George Woltman

George Woltman
George Woltman, computer scientist and noted prime number hobbyist, in 1993.
Born(1957-11-10)November 10, 1957
Alma materMassachusetts Institute of Technology
Known forGIMPS, mprime/Prime95, gwnum
Scientific career
Fieldsnumber theory, volunteer computing, computer science

George Woltman (born November 10, 1957) is the founder of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a distributed computing project researching Mersenne prime numbers using his software Prime95. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a BS and a MS in computer science. He lives in North Carolina.[1]

His mathematical libraries (gwnum) created for the GIMPS project are the fastest known for multiplication of large integers on x86 and x86-64 CPUs. They are used by other distributed computing projects as well, such as Seventeen or Bust[2] and PrimeGrid (PRST).[3] GMP-ECM, a sophisticated software package for Lenstra elliptic-curve factorization, can also use gwnum for a more than 8× speedup in stage 1.[4]

He also worked on a TTL version of Maze War while a student at MIT. Later he worked as a programmer for Data General.[1]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b "PrimePage Bios: George F. Woltman". t5k.org.
  2. ^ Helm, Louie; Norris, David (2002–2016). "Seventeen or Bust Distributed Computing". Archived from the original on April 5, 2016.
  3. ^ "PrimePage Bios: Pavel Atnashev's PRST". t5k.org. PRST is a primality testing utility written in C++ by Pavel Atnashev. It is based on GWnum multiplication library by George Woltman.
  4. ^ McLaughlin, Paul. "INSTALL-gwnum". gitlab.inria.fr.


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