Discoveries
During check-out of the ILLIAC II, before it became fully operational, faculty member Donald B. Gillies programmed ILLIAC II to search for mersenne prime numbers. The check-out period took roughly 3 weeks, during which the computer verified all the previous mersenne primes and found 3 new prime numbers. The results were immortalized for more than a decade on a UIUC Postal Annex cancellation stamp, and were discussed in the New York Times, recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records, and described in a journal paper in Mathematics of Computation.
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