An amateur scientist in the US state of California has calculated the largest known prime number to date. The number has more than 41 million digits, according to the prime number project Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS for short).
Prime number hunter Luke Durant needed about a week of uninterrupted computer time to prove the prime number. The 36-year-old made the calculation with the help of the global citizen science project GIMPS, in which people around the world donate their computer time.
The new record prime number has exactly 41,024,320 digits and is also the 52nd known so-called Mersenne prime number. They are named after the French monk Marin Mersenne and are calculated with the formula 2 to the power n minus 1. The new highest prime number is therefore calculated from 2 to the power 136279841 minus 1.
Prime numbers are important for encryption these days
For more than 2,000 years, no practical use could be made of the knowledge of prime numbers. However, that changed with the advent of electronic calculators. Today, prime numbers are of great importance for signal transmission technology and for encryption methods, for example on the Internet.
Source: Krone
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