Become a Rich and Famous Mathematician

How would you like to make $100,000 and be recognized as a significant contributor to the mathematical community without having to do any work? The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS for short, allows common people to help achieve big things simply by downloading and running a free program in the background of their computer. GIMPS is a collaborative project that utilizes the computing power of all of the computers who have downloaded the program to search for the highest Mersenne Prime number. A mersenne prime is a positive integer that is one less than a power of two. This effort has accounted for finding 13 Mersenne primes the, largest of which is 243,112,609 – 1. The amount of computations that have been made since this project began would not have been fathomable if it was running on simply one computer since no single computer has enough computing power to do this alone. Its success has been due to GIMPS willingness to freely distribute the algorithm to other computers with the end goal of finding these Mersenne primes.  This is a great example of how crowdsourcing an effort can be way more successful than trying to work on a project internally in an organization. GIMPS which was founded in 1997 was the leader in large scale distributed research computing over the internet. I suspect that more companies and organizations will continue to follow this successful model.