[math-fun] possible new Mersenne prime

The GIMPS project has another report of a new Mersenne prime. If confirmed, this would be the 41st known. George Woltman is doing some preliminary checking to exclude the type of false report that happened a few months ago. After that, the full check takes a couple of weeks. The full check involves rerunning the Lucas-Lehmer test on different hardware and software. The preliminary check just rechecks the last few thousand steps in the LL test, rerunning from a saved intermediate residue. The recent false report is believed to have been caused by a "just at the wrong time" hardware failure, creating an accidental 0 residue. Rerunning the last few LL steps excludes this case. Rich rcs@cs.arizona.edu