# New Music; New Prime

## New Music

Now that I’m in possession of a keyboard and drum pads again I’ve been spending some time doodling around in Reason and coming up with some small tracks. I’ve uploaded these on Soundcloud in this playlist here, currently there are eight of them but I’d like to get at least two or so per week up for the forseeable future. Nothing serious, though.. right now I’m just flexing my atrophied musical muscles until my friend and I literally get the band back together.

## New Prime

A couple of months ago I picked up a monster graphics card with the hope that it would find prime numbers faster and of greater magnitude1. Well, my buddy paid off a few days ago with a 909,604-digit whopper of a prime, $$8704114^{131072}+1$$. It was found as part of the Generalized Fermat Prime search, which is trying to find primes of the form $$x^{2^n}+1$$ where $$n$$ ranges from 16 to the low 20s (in this case $$n=17$$). At the time of its discovery it was the 335th largest prime number known to humanity ever which I find mildly incredible, although not everyone is the type of person to get into an arguably pointless project like this in the first place, so maybe it’s just me. (As of this writing it’s already slipped to 336 though, 😞.)

You can see a decimal representation of this number here (it starts with a 3).

1. All right, video gaming played a factor in this as well. You have to understand, I was in grad school for over two years with onboard graphics and no time…