44th Mersenne Prime Number Confirmed

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.

Less than a year after the 43rd Mersenne prime was reported (See our past posting), GIMPS project has discovered the 44th known Mersenne prime. The candidate prime was flagged prime by Dr. Curtis Cooper and Dr. Steven Boone who are also the discoverers of the 43rd known Mersenne prime. The GIMPS website states that this proves lightning can strike twice!

Mersenne numbers are numbers of the form M_n = 2ⁿ - 1, giving the first few as 1, 3, 7, 15, 31, 63, 127, .... The new Mersenne prime is 2^32,582,657 - 1. It has a whopping total of 9,808,358 digits. It is therefore not only the largest known Mersenne prime, but also the largest known prime of any kind. It was the 10th prime number discovered by GIMPS by running a program Prime95 that can be freely downloaded from GIMPS's website. For Additional details see Mersenne.org press release.