Record-Breaking Prime Number, 41 Million Digits Long, Blows Mathematicians’ Minds ...

Specifically, 136,279,841 ones in a row. If we stacked up that many sheets of paper, the resulting tower would stretch into ...

That certainly hasn’t stopped mathematicians —both professional and amateur—from trying to ferret out new ones. In fact, in 1996, computer scientist George Woltman started a project known as the Great ...

That comes to 41,024,320 digits. If you remember your math lessons from school, a prime number is any number that can only be evenly divided by itself or 1. It's one of the most basic concepts in ...

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After a six-year drought, we now have a new largest known prime number, thanks to an amateur mathematics sleuth who deployed an army of graphics processing units (GPUs) to crunch through the ...

It's unusual for at least two reasons. First, it's a palindrome, so it reads the same backwards as forwards (not counting the ...

Former Nvidia programmer Luke Durant used an unusual computer setup to discover a Mersenne prime that is — wait for it — 41 million digits long.

It’s been nearly six years since math devotees discovered the last largest known prime number, but the bar has officially been raised by over 16 million digits. On October 21, the Great Internet ...

Luke Durant, a researcher and amateur mathematician, has identified the largest new prime number known to humankind. The newly discovered prime number is 2 to the power of 136,279,841, then minus one.

Your support makes all the difference. Prime numbers, the building blocks of mathematics, are divisible only by themselves and 1. The first prime numbers are 2, 3, 5, 7, 11. Finding the next ones ...