Some people claim they want to make America great again. Others say America is great right now.
Certainly, the discovery — right here in the United States of America — of the largest prime number currently known to the universe is a point on the side of existing greatness.
The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) — a team of volunteer researchers — announced the finding earlier this month.
The newly-found prime number has well over 22 million digits. That’s nearly five million digits longer than the previously-known largest prime number. Here it is, in exponential form:
If you are rusty on your prime numbers, they are integers which are only divisible by 1 and themselves. Thus, you will recall, the number 7 is prime because the only two positive integers you can multiply to get 7 are 1 and 7.
Getting to the largest primer number ever known is a simple three-step process: (1) Start with 2 — the first prime number (and also the only even prime number). Then, (2) take your 2 and multiply it 74,207,281 times. Then, (3) subtract 1.
That’s it.
The number only takes a few months to write out in its complete form.
A computer at the University of Central Missouri running software from GIMPS — and otherwise sitting idle — accomplished the calculation leading to the discovery of the gi-normous prime number.
The event actually occurred on Sept. 17 but nobody knew it because some computer glitch prevented a series of emails from being sent, reports The New York Times.
Earlier this month, a server administrator in Seattle, Wash. was doing scheduled maintenance and realized the momentous prime-number breakthrough. The administrator corroborated the numbers and alerted Curtis Cooper, the computer science professor who was running the software in rural Missouri.
Cooper told the Times that the computer on which the software ran when the discovery occurred will be set aside in a prime-number hall of fame of sorts.
During its two decades of existence, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search has been responsible for several trailblazing discoveries in the — admittedly narrow — field of prime number research.
“I’ve always been interested in prime numbers,” George Woltman, the founder of the volunteer group, said upon his retirement, according to the Times. “I had a lot of time on my hands.”
It’s not clear if there are any prime numbers between the old biggest prime number and the new biggest prime number.
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