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A comment on Astronomers want public funds for intelligent life search. Parent comment

Re:Astronomers want public funds for intelligent life search by redis_mlc on Saturday February 15, 2020 @04:48AM (#22334298)
> I crunched for years on seti@home at the turn of the century and have always been a fan of the project.

What I told people was that Seti@Home was a waste of time, but Mersenne Prime finding was a useful idea:

"GIMPS, founded in 1996, has discovered the last 17 Mersenne primes."

https://www.mersenne.org/

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Re:Astronomers want public funds for intelligent life search by PeterisP on Saturday February 15, 2020 @10:08AM (#22335701)
Has the discovery of these 17 primes been useful in any way for further mathematics analysis? Are there any hypotheses or theorems about Mersenne primes that have used the facts about these 17 particular numbers in any way?
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