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Re: Misprint

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg111078] Re: Misprint
• From: Bill Rowe <readnews at sbcglobal.net>
• Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2010 02:11:17 -0400 (EDT)

On 7/18/10 at 1:05 AM, lehin.p at gmail.com (Alexey) wrote:

>It seems that there is a misprint on the page
>http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/usersanduses/mersenne.
>html We read that "In June 1999 an international group of
>mathematicians, computer scientists, and hobbyists <...> discovered
>that 2^6972593-1 is prime." But it is not true: In[3]:=
>PrimeQ[2^26972593 - 1] Out[3]= False

Given
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_prime#cite_note-17>
and
<http://primes.utm.edu/mersenne/>

both indicate 2^6972593-1 is prime and cite references, it does
seem like the issue is not a typo on the web page you found.
Rather, it seems there is a problem with PrimeQ. Note, I didn't
wait long enough for PrimeQ to return a response on my system
and consequently did not reproduce your result.