The largest prime number with more than 9 million digits

A group of scientists from the University of Missouri, USA, has used more than 700 computers to find the largest prime number so far, a whopping number of 9,152,052 numbers.

This discovery was made on December 15 and was confirmed on December 24, marking the second time this year a computer matching project called Mersenne Prime Number Search on the Internet ( GIMPS - Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search finds the largest prime number. But similar to the findings in February, the newly discovered figure has yet to reach the 10 million figure required to win a $ 100,000 prize from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Monk Marin Mersenne

The GIMPS project harnesses the power of more than 200,000 computers provided voluntarily with the task of finding all Mersene primes. A prime number is a number that can only be divisible by 1 and itself, and a Mersenne prime number is a special form with the formula 2p-1 where p is also a prime number. For example, 7 is also a Mersenne prime because it is a prime number and equals 23-1.

For several years, the largest large primes discovered are all Mersenne primes. They are named after Marin Mersenne, a French monk born in 1588, who discovered this number.

Mersenne primes in many cases have been found by individuals, but this time the result is that of a group of volunteers. This group has so far devoted a more processing capacity than anyone: equivalent to the processing capabilities of a Pentium 90MHz computer running continuously for 67,000 years. Two professors Curtis Cooper and Steven Boone are in charge of this project.

The prime number discovered this time is the 43th Mersenne element found, equal to 230,402,457-1. Those who want to see this real number can download it here.