New Largest Known Prime Number: 2^57,885,161-1

Posted by timothy on Tuesday February 5, 2013 @05:07AM from the sorry-won't-fit-on-vanity-plate dept.

An anonymous reader writes with news from Mersenne.org, home of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search: "On January 25th at 23:30:26 UTC, the largest known prime number, 257,885,161-1, was discovered on GIMPS volunteer Curtis Cooper's computer. The new prime number, 2 multiplied by itself 57,885,161 times, less one, has 17,425,170 digits. With 360,000 CPUs peaking at 150 trillion calculations per second, GIMPS — now in its 17th year — is the longest continuously-running global 'grassroots supercomputing' project in Internet history."

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Number of Digits by necro81 · 2013-02-05 05:47 · Score: 5, Interesting

The new prime number, 2 multiplied by itself 57,885,161 times, less one, has 17,425,170 digits
"There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those that don't."

This new number is 2^57,885,161 - 1, so naturally it has 57,885,161 digits, all of them 1. A simpler example: 2^5 - 1 is a Mersenne prime. Written in binary it's 100000 - 1 = 11111.

Oh! You meant that it has 17,425,170 decimal digits. Booooooooring!