Michael Shafer

Michael Shafer is the discoverer of the 40th known Mersenne prime, 2^20996011-1, found on November 17, 2003. He is a graduate student attending Michigan State University (MSU).

The discovery was made on a Pentium 4 Dell computer in his office at MSU running Prime95, special software provided by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, a distributed computing project.