Mathematicians discover world’s largest prime number

Just like any other subject the research never ends as scientists and mathematicians are always working on finding new things in the world of maths. Now it looks like researchers have been able to make another breakthrough as they have figured out the world’s largest prime number.

If you don’t remember the definition of Prime number is that, a number which is only divisible by 1 and itself.

The prime number, which was discovered by Curtis Cooper from University of Central Missouri consists of 17,425,170 digits. The discovery was made by using GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) program. The GIMPS program is used to find a special kind of prime number by creating networks between PCs all around the world. The world’s largest prime number is 2 raised to the 57,885,161 power minus 1. The prime number is so massive that the text file containing the whole number is 22MB in size.

What makes this particular prime number even more significant is that it is the first prime number discovered in last four years. While the Prime Number will have very insignificant effect on Maths it is still considered a great achievement in the Mathematics community.