Speaker: Jeff Gilchrist

Title:  "How we discovered 2^43112609 - 1 is Prime"

Abstract:

In August 2008, a 12.9 million digit prime number was discovered.
This was the first prime discovered with more than 10 million digits
and is currently the largest known prime number.  We provide a brief
history of prime number discoveries and present the current top 10
list.  We will also describe some state of the art primality testing
and factoring techniques and how they relate to the discovery process
of the largest known prime number.  Finally, we will discuss what
improvements and future work are required to continue pushing the
field of prime number discovery.