And it only has 23 million digits - 23,249,425 to be exact.
How mind boggling is that? Well, prime numbers are numbers that have no positive divisors except 1 and itself. So how can a number with more than 23M digits be divisible only by 1 and itself? I don't even want to think about it.
image from pixabay
The number simply called M77232917 is a Mersene prime which can be found by multiplying twos together and subtracting one from the final product. It beats the previous record discovered in January 2016 by 910,807 digits.
Jonathan Pace from Tennessee discovered the number using a specialized software (GIMPS) in his PC on December 26, 2017. To validate its primality, the number has to be tested for six days of non-stop computing.
To be thorough, the prime number was independently verified with four different programs running on various hardware configurations.
Jonathan Pace will be awarded US$3000 for his discovery.
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