Largest prime number yet is discovered

Feb 08, 2013 |

Researchers have identified the world’s largest prime number yet, beating the previous record by over four million digits.

The number has now shot up to 2 multiplied by itself 57,885,161 times minus 1, breaking a four-year dry spell in the search for new, ever-larger primes.
Curtis Cooper from the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg made the finding as part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, a distributed computing project designed to hunt for a particular kind of prime number first identified in the 17th century, the New Scientist reported.
“It’s sort of like finding a diamond,” says Chris Caldwell at the University of Tennessee, Martin, who keeps a record of the largest known primes.

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