According to GIMPS, this is the first time a prime number was not found by an ordinary PC, but rather a “‘cloud supercomputer’ spanning 17 countries” that utilized an Nvidia A100 GPU chip to make the initial diagnosis. The primary architect of this find is Luke Durant, who worked at Nvidia as a software engineer for 11 years
I don’t know why Nvidia is mentioned at all, except the hardware. That’s cool that this person found the number, but Nvidia didn’t do anything except employ them once upon a time and make a product that does a thing. It’s not justified to celebrate the maker of a stove when a soup kitchen feeds everyone.
This is a win for Luke and GIMPS in general, and I’m happy for them.
secretlyaddictedtolinux@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
I don’t understand this and therefore it’s stupid and pointless. Fuck you math elitist assholes with your so-called “large” prime numbers spending billions of dollars that could be used to make my life better. I don’t understand this at all and there it does not matter. The end.
Urist@lemmy.ml 1 hour ago
Yeah, fuck those assholes that pursue science for the benefit of humanity! I do not see why anyone should be allowed to be creative if I do not ser the benefit for me in particular.
secretlyaddictedtolinux@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Exactly! I don’t even see how there could be a benefit for me. If I don’t understand it, there’s no benefit. After all, I did take Algebra. We need to decide democratically what science is, with everyone getting a fair vote, so wasteful science like this can finally be stopped.
wieson@lemmy.world 46 minutes ago
If you want it to be useful for the economy and industry in order to warrant funding, I’ve got news for you:
The majority of modern encryption relies on prime numbers. It is currently speculated but not known, that the number of prime numbers is infinite.
Should it be proven, that there are only a finite amount of prime numbers, all encryption would become vulnerable.
Miaou@jlai.lu 30 minutes ago
It is easily provable that there is an infinite number of prime numbers.
iknowitwheniseeit@lemmynsfw.com 32 minutes ago
There are infinite prime numbers. This has been known for thousands of years. You can find numerous proofs of this online, and go through them until one makes sense to you.
Also, quantum computers are on track to make division-based cryptography useless in the next decade or two. (Note that this only affects public key cryptography, and not shared key cryptography. So your online backups should be safe as long as you have a password for them.)