An Amateur Mathematician Discovers a New Prime Number with More Than 16 Million Digits Compared to the Previous Record.
Luke Durant, an amateur researcher and former Nvidia employee, has discovered the largest prime number ever known: 2136,279,841 – 1, surpassing the previous record of 282,589,933 – 1 by more than 16 digits, according to Live Science. Prime numbers are natural numbers greater than 1 that have no positive divisors other than 1 and themselves. The smallest prime numbers are 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11. Theoretically, there are infinitely many prime numbers, but finding them becomes increasingly challenging as their values grow larger.
Sapphire Technology AMD graphics processing unit housing. (Photo: MSN)
To discover the new prime number, Luke Durant utilized a free program called Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) to analyze every possibility using an algorithm. His efforts required the use of thousands of graphics processing units (GPUs) across 24 data centers in 17 countries, marking a “conclusion to 28 years of dominance by conventional personal computers in the search for enormous prime numbers,” according to a statement on the GIMPS website.
The newly confirmed prime number contains 41,024,320 digits. It is also the 52nd known Mersenne prime, a series of prime numbers named after Marin Mersenne, a French monk and scientist who formulated a method for identifying prime numbers using the expression 2p – 1, where p is a positive integer. Although this is not the only method for discovering prime numbers, it is simpler than many other approaches.
According to the GIMPS team, many cryptographic algorithms have been developed based on prime numbers. This discovery earned Durant a $3,000 reward from GIMPS. A prize ranging from $150,000 to $250,000 will be awarded to those who discover prime numbers with hundreds of millions and billions of digits, respectively.
