Areed.181 net.general utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ihnss!cbosg!harpo!chico!duke!reed!crandall Fri Jul 31 03:29:06 1981 giant primes several months ago we networked word of some giant prime numbers discovered here (with 'as' & 'c' routines, v7 unix 11/70) and that we were attempting to settle the primality question for all num- bers of the four forms: n! + 1 n! - 1 2*3*5*...*p + 1 2*3*5*...*p - 1 having not more than 1000 digits. this note is to announce that all such primes are now known. compute time: 3 million cpu-secs, of which four-fifths involved primality proofs per se. the last of the four categories above is by far the toughest. also, we actually went beyond 500! +- 1. i propose that a name be adopted for the unit of one million cpu-seconds; and that the name be 'maid', in honor of the famous dinner maid who rescued blaise pascal. finally, i wonder how many projects out there in unix-land re- quire a maid ? r.e.crandall department of physics reed college portland, or 97202 ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.