Mersenne

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A prime number that can be expressed in the form of 2^p - 1, where p is also a prime number
2. Relating to a specific class of numbers named after a French monk who studied these forms
3. Referring to a mathematical concept essential in number theory and computer science for its properties relevant to primality testing and factorization

Etymology: Marin Mersenne was a French friar and mathematician of the seventeenth century, a correspondent of Descartes, Fermat and Pascal, who acted as a clearing house for mathematical results across Europe. In his 1644 work "Cogitata Physico-Mathematica" he listed which numbers of the form 2^p − 1 he believed were prime for primes p up to 257. Several of his claims were wrong, but the expressions he studied took his name, and any prime of that form is now called a Mersenne prime. The term is an eponym coined in modern mathematics, not something Mersenne himself used. Mersenne's name attached to these numbers gradually through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the search for ever-larger ones became a serious pursuit, and today the largest known primes are almost all Mersenne primes, found by distributed computing projects such as GIMPS.