Los Angeles Times: The mathematicians have found the first verified Mersenne prime number with more than 10 million digits, putting them in line to win a six-digit prize from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
UCLA mathematicians discover a 13-million-digit prime number
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The discovery of the 13-million-digit prime number by UCLA mathematicians is really interesting.
I have always had an interest in very large numbers and number theory and the many, in fact in theory, the infinite number of possible future discoveries, patterns, and relationships among numbers in number theory.
The really cool thing about "numbers" themselves, especially positive integers is that one has to admit that they are relevant to absolutely every entity that exists. For those who believe in a Holy Trinity as God as I do, due to my Catholic upbringing, I have to say that the Three Divine Persons are simply that; "3" Divine Persons. Obviously, one can arrange these Persons in terms of the set of subsets of the Three Persons with the number of elements being equal (2 EXP 3) - 1. One can form the set of subsets of this set of subsets and so on to produce sets with infinitely many subsets.
For those who believe that each human being is an individual, or that each human soul is an individual entity, as well as the same for each angel, a similar argument applies.
It does not matter whether we are Atheists, Agnostic, Catholic, Born Again Christians, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, New Age, or whatever, we can all realize how ever present are numbers within the very order of creation and in the entire physical and spiritual cosmos.
Numbers are that intangible reality, that although embodied within even any spiritual realities, are not known to be spiritual realities in them selves. Neither are the numbers known to be physical realities. They seem to have their very own form of existence or being.
Knowing this should not cause those who believe in an absolutely ontologically simple God as I do to fret, for perhaps GOD created the numbers themselves, thus leading to the conclusion that God is even more ephemeral, sublime, and mysterious then any reified object of a number or reality of ordinality.
Just as physicists and cosmologists have perhaps an infinite universe to explore, so there is also and infinite mathematical landscape of topology, geometry, number theory, etc to explore.