Please Welcome The Largest-Yet Prime Number

The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) yesterday (3 January) announced the discovery what is the largest known prime number – 2^77,232,917 -1 – that comprises of 23,249,425 digits. The number,, known as M77232917 was discovered by a volunteer named Jonathan Pace, a 51-year old engineer from Tennessee in the United States on 26 December, 2017. It was obtained by multiplying the number 2 by itself 77,232,917 times and then subtracting 1 from it.

M77232917 is nearly a million digits larger than the previous record prime number M74207281 and is part of a series of extremely rare prime numbers known as Mersenne primes – prime numbers that are obtained by subtracting 1 from a power of 2. This discovery is the fiftieth Mersenne prime.

It took six days of non-stop computing on a PC to obtain the the primality proof which was then independently verified using four different programs on four different systems with different hardware configurations to ensure that there were no errors in the prime discovery process.

Mersenne primes are named for the French monk Marin Mersenne, who studied the numbers in the early seventeenth century. GIMPS is a volunteer-driven project that uses free software to discover Mersenne primes.

Also Read: I Am A Number. Am I Prime?