43rd known Mersenne prime found!

well, it was in december, but I had not been keeping up with the mersenne project (too much stuff going on at work). So this is good news, the new prime has more than 9 million digits, but the $100.000 prize is still up for grabs for all of you that only contribute for the money (just kidding).

Today was a great day. A part of my code that didn't seem to run (an iterative solver for dense non-symmetric matrices) was glitched. As the idiot that I am I had forgotten to change one of the auxiliary functions from a previous version and I had scrambled the data. Oh well... At least everything will be much faster from now on!

By the way, the Bering gloves I got for biking are quite nice. Not too warm (and that's saying something when you live in the tropics) and they can take the rain without complain. I rode with them for 20 minutes under heavy rain a few days ago and my hands were dry when I arrived home. Actually, my hands were the only part of my body that was dry by that time!

Anyway, good night, and visit the mersenne wiki to learn about mersenne primes if you fancy it...