The
Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or
GIMPS, is a collaborative project of volunteers, who download software over the
internet in order to search for
Mersenne prime numbers. The project was founded and the software was written by George Woltman. This project has been rather successful: the largest currently known
prime numbers have been found by participants of the group.
This includes the largest known prime which, as of November
2002, is 2
13,466,917-1. This prime was discovered on 14th November
2001 by Michael Cameron from
Canada.
External links: