this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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New largest prime number discovered by former Nvidia software engineer (sherwood.news)
submitted 1 month ago by gedaliyah@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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

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[–] Urist@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Much of the basis for the RSA cryptosystem, and by extension much of modern computing, was done by some mathematician who prided himself that his work was not applied mathematics and could not ever be applied in any way (bonus point for being pertinent to the topic of large primes). Science is exploratory work, not a straight path to some predefined goal. The person above is evidently clueless as to how science is conducted.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

Yes I'm with you 100% there :-)