Largest prime number ever found

Prime number discovered by a US engineer, more than 23 million digits

Largest prime number? how long would that even be right? But guess what, US-based electrical engineer has discovered the largest known prime number, having as many as 23,249,425 digits. The 51-year old mathematics enthusiast arrived at the number by subtracting 1 from 2 to the power of 77,232,917. Proving this took six days of PC computing.
A computer in Missouri discovered the previous record of the  largest known prime number but now the second largest, 2^74,207,281– 1. It is about 22 million digits long, 5 million digits longer than it’s previous record.
A Mersenne prime is a prime number that is one less than a power of two i.e it is of the form for some integer n. They are named after Marin Marsenne, a French Minim friar, who studied them in the early 17th century. The new result of Mersenne primes is nearly a million digits longer than the previous record holder. The previous record-holding number, the 49th Mersenne prime ever found, making the new one the 50th.

Edited by -Rodney Cutinho

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