George Woltman (born November 10, 1957) is the founder of the

Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) is a collaborative project of volunteers who use freely available software to search for Mersenne prime numbers. GIMPS was founded in 1996 by George Woltman, who also wrote the Prime95 client and ...

(GIMPS), a

distributed computing Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers. The components of a distributed system commu ...

project researching

Mersenne prime In mathematics, a Mersenne prime is a prime number that is one less than a power of two. That is, it is a prime number of the form for some integer . They are named after Marin Mersenne, a French Minim friar, who studied them in the early 1 ...

numbers using his software Prime95. He graduated from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

(MIT) with a degree in computer science. He lives in

North Carolina North Carolina ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, South Carolina to the south, Georgia (U.S. stat ...

. His mathematical libraries created for the GIMPS project are the fastest known for multiplication of large integers, and are used by other

projects as well, such as

Seventeen or Bust PrimeGrid is a volunteer computing project that searches for very large (up to world-record size) prime numbers whilst also aiming to solve long-standing mathematical conjectures. It uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BO ...

. He also worked on a TTL version of

Maze War ''Maze'', also known as ''Maze War'', is a 3D multiplayer first-person shooter maze game originally developed in 1973 and expanded in 1974. The first version was developed by high school students Steve Colley, Greg Thompson, and Howard Palmer fo ...

while a student at MIT. Later he worked as a programmer for

Data General Data General Corporation was an early minicomputer firm formed in 1968. Three of the four founders were former employees of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Their first product, 1969's Data General Nova, was a 16-bit minicomputer intended to ...

References

External links

The Prime Pages Titan Biography

GIMPS home page
1957 births Living people Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians MIT School of Engineering alumni {{compu-bio-stub

See also

References

External links