Re:2^74207281-1 is Prime
by yen223 on Tuesday January 19, 2016 @12:04PM
(#10932011)
Repeated exactly 74,207,281 times, to be precise...
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No, the number 5 is prime, yet in binary it is 101. The new prime number could have many zeroes interspersed with ones, so you don't know how many 1 digits it has.
EDIT: I have realized my mistake in the representation of 2's complement. However, I will leave this here for posterity.
It's a Mersenne Prime, so it is 1 less than some power of 2. This results in all of its non-leading digits in binary being 1s.
Re:2^74207281-1 is Prime
by theandrewbailey on Tuesday January 19, 2016 @12:25PM
(#10932185)
But 5 is not 2^n-1
5 is a prime number true, but not a Mersenne prime number. The Mersenne prime number 31 has 5 as its exponent n [1].