👉 The longest known computation, often referred to as the "Millennium Prize Problem" or "Planet Computation," was a task proposed by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000, which involves calculating the largest prime number less than one million. This problem is part of a set of seven Millennium Prize Problems, considered the most challenging and important unsolved problems in mathematics. The computation itself was initiated by the mathematician Michael Beaver in 1973, who sought to find the largest prime number less than a given limit, denoted as π(n). To tackle this, researchers developed the AKS primality test in 2002, a groundbreaking algorithm that can determine whether a number is prime in polynomial time, thus solving the problem efficiently. However, the actual computation required to find π(1,000,000) took over 20 years and involved the combined efforts of thousands of mathematicians and computer scientists, using supercomputers to perform an enormous number of calculations. This monumental task not only pushed the boundaries of computational power and mathematical theory but also highlighted the immense potential and complexity of large-scale computations in solving long-standing mathematical questions.
