Finding the new and largest prime number with ... 22 million digits

The new number of elements has 5 million digits higher than the old number.

The higher the increase in value, the greater the distance between adjacent prime numbers. Therefore, the journey to find the prime numbers that people never knew will become more and more difficult.

Journey to find the number of elements that people do not know is increasingly more difficult.

According to Cnet, the largest number of elements that people find has kept their record for three years: on January 25, 2013, (2 ^ 57.885.161-1), a number of 17,425,170 number of projects Searched for Internet Primes Mersenne GIMPS identifies as the largest prime number found by humans.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of its founding, GIMPS published the new largest prime number: (2 ^ 74.207.281-1) , a number of 22,338,618 digits.

Dr. Curtis Cooper of the University of Central Missouri contributed computers and monitored the calculation process to find this prime number. This is the fourth record of Dr. Cooper, who contributed the most to the GIMPS project . Two other GIMPS members, Scott Kurowski and Aaron Blosser, also contributed to finding this number.

Marin Mersenne, the first to study prime numbers in the form 2 ^ n-1.

The computer equipped with Core i7-4790 processor running the software designed by GIMPS founder George Woltman took 31 days to find the new prime number (code name M74207281) . This result was later confirmed by independent parties.

M74207281 is not just a normal prime but also a Mersenne prime because it has a power of 2 minus 1. Until now, humans have only found 49 Mersenne primes, in which GIMPS alone found 16 numbers. These numbers are named after Marin Mersenne, the first to set a list of prime numbers in the form 2 ^ n-1.

The road from M74207281 to the next milestone will be a long journey: GIMPS hopes to award a new record and a $ 150,000 prize to the EFF Electronic Front Organization when it finds a number of elements with 100 million digits.