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Does it make sense to keep track of largest known prime?

In other words:

Are there any (more or less practical) situations, where we need the largest known prime? (except of the "situation" of searching of even bigger prime)

porton
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  • The same question about largest known Mersenne prime – porton Jun 13 '16 at 07:51
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    As far as I know the answer to that question is no. Finding such primes can be a test of available computing power and testing the efficiency of software. But other than that there are no applications other than bragging about it. – Mathematician 42 Jun 13 '16 at 07:57
  • @Mathematician42 Large primes are often helpful in public key cryptography, that makes you secure in this vary virtual world called Internet. Though you cannot use the largest known prime, there is no point using it if everybody knows about it. – Kushal Bhuyan Jun 13 '16 at 08:00
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    @KushalBhuyan That was long time ago that prime numbers were used in cryptography !!! in MD5, blowfish or other algorithms that we use now, there is nothing related to prime numbers – Arman Malekzadeh Jun 13 '16 at 08:00
  • @KushalBhuyan: No, if you are thinking about RSA or someting like that, then the answer is still no. RSA uses the product of $2$ primes of about $300$ digits, much less than the largest known primes! – Mathematician 42 Jun 13 '16 at 08:05

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