Largest Prime Number Discovered! Over 17 Million Digits Long

Math geeks, rejoice. The largest prime number yet has been discovered, and it's a whopping 17,425,170 digits long. This new finding crushes the one that was made in 2008, which was a mere 12,978,189 digits long.

Yet this discovery didn't come easily. A giant network of volunteer computers has been dedicated to finding primes. The network, called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), uses about 360,000 processors operating at 150 trillion calculations per second. Curtis Cooper, University of Central Missouri mathematician, was the one to make the official finding, though. This is the third massive prime number that the researcher has discovered to date.

The number itself is two raised to the 57,885,161 power minus one. It's currently the 48^th example of a rare class of primes called Mersenne Primes. This elite group of numbers takes the form of two raised to the power of a prime number minus one. They were first described almost 350 years ago, but only 48 of them have appeared in mathematics thus far.

How do we know that Cooper was right? Several other mathematicians checked and double-checked the number using other computers. The result was that the number is indeed a Mersenne Prime.

Although the significance of this particular finding is dubious, it does have a certain appeal to mathematicians. Finding such a large prime that is also a Mersenne Prime is similar to climbing the Mt. Everest of mathematics. George Woltman, the retired, computer scientist who created GIMPS said in an interview with Livscience.com, "People enjoy it for the challenge of the discovery of finding something that's never been known before."

Cooper won't just walk away with his name in the hall of fame of mathematicians, though. His recent discovery also qualifies him for a $3000 GIMPS research discovery award. That's not bad for crunching numbers.