On 3 September 1996, Cray Research announced that Slowinski and Gage had set a new record by finding the prime 2^1257787-1 which has 378,632 digits. This was then the largest known prime -- the next largest has 258,716 digits. It was also the 34th Mersenne prime to be discovered (though it might not be the 34th in order of size as the entire region below it has not been checked). Read more
Prime numbers are found hidden in nature, but humans have made spectacular use of them, writes mathematician Marcus du Sautoy. Ever since humans evolved on this planet we have been trying to make sense of the world around us. We have attempted to explain why the world looks and behaves the way it does, to predict what the future holds. And in our search for answers we have uncovered a code that makes sense of the huge complexity that confronts us - mathematics. Read more
Mathematicians at UCLA have discovered a 13-million-digit prime number, a long-sought milestone that makes them eligible for a $100,000 prize. The group found the 46th known Mersenne prime last month on a network of 75 computers running Windows XP. The number was verified by a different computer system running a different algorithm
A 12 million digit prime number, the largest such number ever discovered, has landed a voluntary math research group a $100,000 prize from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The number known as a Mersenne prime, is the 45th known Mersenne prime, written shorthand as 2 to the power of 43,112,609, minus 1 . A Mersenne number is a positive integer that is one less than a power of two, the group stated.