New Prime Number

Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) is a distributed computing project. It is like the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) project that uses Internet-connected computers in search of extra-terrestrials, but GIMPS does the same for the discovery of new prime numbers that are divisible only by the number 1 and itself.

Last month a computing team led by Curtis Cooper and Steven Boone, as part of the GIMPS project, discovered the largest known prime number, 2^(30,402,457)-1 [To be read as 'one less than the number which is 2 to the power of 30,402,457].

The discovery is marked as the 43rd known Mersenne prime which is a prime number that is one less than a prime power of two. For example, 31 (a prime number) = 32 − 1 = 2^5 − 1. It was the 9th prime number discovered by GIMPS by running a program Prime95 that can be freely downloaded from GIMPS's website.