I have always been a fan of large prime numbers, and Mersenne Primes in particular.
George Woltman has organized the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, which I've been a part of for several months. He has over 17,000 people looking for the largest known prime numbers, using PCs. It's a great story, and a great use of those idle PC cycles.
Since its inception, GIMPS has been responsible for finding the last three world-record prime numbers.
Of course, I'm sure that the reason I've told you all this has nothing to do with my being one of the Top Producers, currently ranked just inside of the top hundred overall in terms of total contribution of compute cycles to Mersenne Prime finding ever.
By the way, it only takes a few minutes to retrieve and install George's software on Windows, Linux, OS/2 or PowerMac systems--you might want to give it a try and take a shot at entering the history books!
For more information on Mersenne Primes and large primes, I'm pretty
fond of the book
The Little Book of Big Primes, the book title there links to the book
at
Amazon Books.
