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How is Mersenne prime verification useful? It’s in the same league as calculating pi to ever more enormous numbers of decimals…

• fsflover 5y ago
  Both of which are useful for verifying mathematical predictions.
  • gweinberg 5y ago
    Like that the digits of pi look a lot like the output of a random number generator? I don't think that prediction is seriously in dispute.
    • fsflover 5y ago
      Yes, it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number
      • jameshart 5y ago
        But generating yet more empirical data that it still seems pretty random out to digit n does nothing to advance us to a proof that pi is normal.
        • fsflover 5y ago
          I'm not sure about that. Maybe there is a very unlikely pattern somewhere around the n-th digit?
          • jameshart 5y ago
            You could find a sequence of 1000 zeroes in the decimal expansion of pi and it would do nothing to prove or refute the idea that pi is normal.