In June of 1993, the British mathematician Andrew Wiles (b. 1953) delivered a series of lectures on “Modular Forms, Elliptic Curves, and Galois Representations.” Though the audience was not large—the topic required a large amount of background knowledge—it had grown beyond expectations. It was rumored that Wiles would announce something […]
Tag: Euler
The Largest Prime So Far: A Brief History
The largest known prime number, discovered by a computer programmer in 2018, is equal to 282,589,933-1 and has 24,862,048 digits. Also known as M82,589,933, it is one of 51 known Mersenne primes. Named for the French priest Marin Mersenne (1588-1648), these primes of the form 2n-1 have dominated prime searches since antiquity. […]