Top person sorted by score

At this site we keep several lists of primes, most notably the list of the 5,000 largest known primes. Who found the most of these record primes? We keep separate counts for persons, projects and programs. To see these lists click on 'number' to the right.

Clearly one 100,000,000 digit prime is much harder to discover than quite a few 100,000 digit primes. Based on the usual estimates we score the top persons, provers and projects by adding ‎(log n)³ log log n‎ for each of their primes n. Click on 'score' to see these lists.

Finally, to make sense of the score values, we normalize them by dividing by the current score of the 5000th prime. See these by clicking on 'normalized score' in the table on the right.

rank person primes score 981 Mike Oakes 18.75 39.5882 982 Bo Tornberg 2 39.5710 983 Keith Klahn 1 39.5652 984 Phil Carmody 0.7833 39.5625 985 Leon Marchal 0.3333 39.5549 986 Ken Davis 85.1667 39.4858 987 Greg Childers 11 39.4683 988 Bouk de Water 44.3666 39.2100 989 Nicholas M. Glover 0.5 39.1453 990 Antal Járai 1.2 38.9168 990 Gabor Farkas 1.2 38.9168 992 S. Urushihata 2 38.6840 993 János Kasza 0.8 38.5025 993 Timea Csajbok 0.8 38.5025 993 Zoltán Járai 0.8 38.5025 996 Maia Karpovich 3 38.0475 997 Gábor E. Gévay 0.4 37.8356 997 Magyar Péter 0.4 37.8356 997 Szekeres Béla 0.4 37.8356 1000 Donald Edward Robinson 0.5 37.4438 1000 Arlin E. Anderson 0.5 37.4438

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Notes:

Score for Primes

To find the score for a person, program or project's primes, we give each prime n the score (log n)³ log log n; and then find the sum of the scores of their primes. For persons (and for projects), if three go together to find the prime, each gets one-third of the score. Finally we take the log of the resulting sum to narrow the range of the resulting scores. (Throughout this page log is the natural logarithm.)

How did we settle on (log n)³ log log n? For most of the primes on the list the primality testing algorithms take roughly O(log(n)) steps where the steps each take a set number of multiplications. FFT multiplications take about

O( log n ^. log log n ^. log log log n )

operations. However, for practical purposes the O(log log log n) is a constant for this range number (it is the precision of numbers used during the FFT, 64 bits suffices for numbers under about 2,000,000 digits).

Next, by the prime number theorem, the number of integers we must test before finding a prime the size of n is O(log n) (only the constant is effected by prescreening using trial division).  So to get a rough estimate of the amount of time to find a prime the size of n, we just multiply these together and we get

O( (log n)³ log log n ).

Finally, for convenience when we add these scores, we take the log of the result.  This is because log n is roughly 2.3 times the number of digits in the prime n, so (log n)³ is quite large for many of the primes on the list. (The number of decimal digits in n is floor((log n)/(log 10)+1)).