If you know your way around Python, grab the code at Github and give it a shot. We used the program on our logo, resulting in the 5500-digit Popular Mechanics Prime. Isn’t it beautiful?

In 2017, however, a developer named Mihai Preda designed an open-source program called GpuOwl to continue the Mersenne prime research through these muc-improved machines.

There’s a New Way to Count Prime Numbers To make progress on one of number theory’s most elementary questions, two mathematicians turned to an unlikely source.

The bigger the prime numbers used, the more possible combinations there are to create the public key and the harder it is to find the right combination. In reality, there is more computation involved.