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 1 Peter Benson 330 50.2142 2 David Metcalfe 182.667 48.5355 3 David Broadhurst 181.367 47.6384 4 Dr. James Scott Brown 159 49.0061 5 Lennart Vogel 155 48.4581 5 Mark Molder 155 48.8708 7 Grzegorz Granowski 103 48.3131 8 Bouk de Water 102.2 38.7875 9 Raymond Schouten 95 48.2825 10 Bruce Dodson 92 48.1098 11 Robert Ruge 87 47.6294 12 Steven Harvey 85 47.6264 13 Honza Cholt 78 47.9211 14 Randall Scalise 77 48.0640 15 Larry Soule 67 48.5097 16 Raphaël Jeudy 66 47.7785 17 Predrag Minovic 56.6667 47.7857 18 Ian M Gunn 53 47.7873 19 Brian Lody 52 47.2553 20 Thomas Ritschel 49.6667 48.4553

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Notes:

Number of primes

When counting primes we decided that if three people (persons) went together to find a prime, each should get credit for 1/3 of a prime. The same is true for projects, however programs get full credit for each prime (to encourage honest reporting of what programs where used). Persons, programs and projects are three separate categories and do not compete against each other.

For example, suppose the persons 'Carmody' and 'Caldwell' worked together and used the program 'PRP' to test candidates selected by the 'GFN 2^13 Sieving project', then completed their proofs using 'Proth.exe'. Then the persons 'Carmody' and 'Caldwell' would get 1/2 credit for each prime found; but the project 'GFN 2^13 Sieving project' and the programs 'PRP' and 'Proth.exe' would each get full credit.