Latest Curtis Cooper Stories

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The largest known prime number was recently discovered on the computer of Curtis Cooper, a Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) volunteer. The new number is 2 raised to 57,885,161 power minus 1 (or 2 multiplied by itself 57,855,161 times minus one) and it has 17,425,170 digits. The GIMPS project is the second longest continuously-running "grassroots supercomputing" project in Internet history, with 360,000 CPU's peaking at 150...

Supersonic winds more than six times faster than those on Jupiter are blasting through the atmosphere of a Jupiter-sized planet 60 light years away, say scientists who've analyzed results from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. They're part of a team that mapped weather on a planet beyond our solar system, a gas giant planet called HD 189733b. "The exoplanet's wind speeds probably exceed the speed of sound," said Adam Showman of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory...

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) - Researchers at a Missouri university have identified the largest known prime number, officials said Tuesday. The team at Central Missouri State University, led by associate dean Steven Boone and mathematics professor Curtis Cooper, found it in mid-December after programming 700 computers years ago. A prime number is a positive number divisible by only itself and 1 - 2, 3, 5, 7 and so on. The number that the team found is 9.1 million digits long. It is a Mersenne prime...