Largest Prime Number

Copyright ©2003 by Paul Niquette. All rights reserved.


 
 
Student Finds Largest Known Prime Number
Associated Press Headline, December 10, 2003

The number is 6,320,430 digits long -- more than 2 million digits larger than the previous largest known prime and requires 1,500 pages to print it. 

The number turned up on a Michigan State University graduate student's computer.  Michael Shafer, 26, participated as a volunteer in an eight-year-old, worldwide project called...

The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search

...which harnessed the power of 211,000 computers, in effect creating a supercomputer capable of performing 9 trillion calculations per second. 

Mersenne primes are a special category, expressed as 2 - 1 where p is also a prime number. Shafer's discovery can be written as...

220,996,011 - 1
...and was independently verified by other participants.

 
What is the proper name for a number of that size?
Hint: See tridecabillion

 

GO TO SOLUTION PAGE