The largest prime number in history, 'M136279841', was discovered, and just listing the numbers with 41,024,320 digits takes up 39.9MB
A new prime number has been discovered that is more than 16 million digits larger than the largest prime number ever found. The number is 2^136279841-1, which is 41,024,320 decimal digits and would take up 39.9MB of text file space.
Mersenne Prime Discovery - 2^136279841-1 is Prime!
Also known as 'M136279841,' this prime number is derived by multiplying 136,279,841 numbers by 2 and subtracting 1. A Mersenne number is a number obtained by subtracting 1 from a power of 2, and M136279841 is the largest known Mersenne prime, more than 16 million digits larger than the largest prime number ever found. Including M136279841, 52 Mersenne primes have been discovered to date.
The discovery was made by former NVIDIA employee Luke Durant, who used an NVIDIA GPU to make the discovery.
In 2017, Mihai Preda created a Mersenne prime test program called 'GpuOwl' that can be run on a GPU, in response to the increasing power of PC GPUs, and released it to the community called 'GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search)'. Durant developed an infrastructure to run and maintain this program on many cloud GPUs, and after about a year of testing, he discovered M136279841 using the power of thousands of GPUs from 24 data centers across 17 countries.
The day after Durant reported that 'M136279841 is probably a prime number,' a Mersenne primality test called the '
GIMPS is a community formed to discover Mersenne primes, and has successfully discovered 17 Mersenne primes to date. In a statement on the discovery of M136279841, GIMPS said, 'This achievement goes to Luke Durant, who discovered the primes, Preda and George Waltman, who developed the software, Aaron Blosser, who maintained the server, and the thousands of GIMPS volunteers. In honor of all these people, the official credit for this discovery goes to Durant, Preda, Waltman, Blosser, and all others (et al.).'
In addition, anyone can participate in GIMPS as long as they have a reasonably high-performance PC or GPU and become a 'prime hunter.' GIMPS provides free prime number search software called 'Prime95,' which can be downloaded from the link below. Incidentally, Prime95 is also popular as a 'stress test tool that puts a load on a PC.'
GIMPS - Free Prime95 software downloads - PrimeNet
If you discover a new Mersenne prime, you have a chance to win a $3,000 or $50,000 Research and Discovery Prize. In addition, the Electronic Frontier Foundation offers a $150,000 prize for the discovery of a 100 million digit prime. Durant is expected to receive $3,000 for the Research and Discovery Prize, and plans to donate the prize money to the Alabama School of Mathematics and Science, with which he has had a long-standing connection.
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