Prime number over 17 million digits discovered

Imagine such a large number that it would take more than 13, 000 A4-size pages to print it. This is the “palpable” size of the newly discovered computer number of Dr. Curtis Cooper at the University of Missouri Central. Cooper's machine was part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a distributed computing project similar to but focused on finding new prime numbers.

The number uncovered, 2 ^{57, 885, 161} - 1, has more than 17 million digits. To give you an idea, the largest prime number to date, discovered in 2009 (2 ^{43, 112, 609} - 1), had “only” 13 million digits. It is worth noting that the numbers calculated by GIMPS follow a form known as the Mersene Primo and are expressed by the formula 2 ^p - 1, where p is also a prime number (in this case 57, 885, 161).

Number occupies 22.7 MB in plain text file

To date, computational efforts around the world have discovered only 48 Mersene Cousins, and theoretically there are an infinite number of them. This search becomes increasingly time consuming because of the high processing power required to find them.

If you want to get a glimpse of how long this can take, know that just the calculation used to verify that the number 2 ^57.855.161 - 1 was really a cousin took 39 days of processing on one of the university's computers.

Anyone who wants to take a look at the whole number can consult it online. However, don't be alarmed if the page takes a long time to load: by copying the number and pasting it into Notepad, you may notice that it generates a 22.7 MB file, ie this is a larger download than many programs registered in Baixaki.