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 an ...

(GIMPS), a

distributed computing A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer sci ...

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 17 ...

numbers using his software

Prime95 Prime95, also distributed as the command-line utility mprime for FreeBSD and Linux, is a freeware application written by George Woltman. It is the official client of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a volunteer computing project ...

. He graduated from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern t ...

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

North Carolina North Carolina () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Georgia a ...

. 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. 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 one of the first minicomputer firms of the late 1960s. 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 minicompu ...

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