US discovers largest prime number

Although mathematics has been around for a long time, number-related discoveries never stop happening. The last one was the largest cousin in existence and, as usual, it was permeated with very interesting curiosities.

The number 2 ^{82, 589, 933} -1, which has more than 24.8 million digits, was discovered on December 7, 2018, and the culprit was Patrick Laroch, a 35-year-old IT professional.

He volunteers on an initiative known as GIMPS, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search - or "The Great Internet Search by Mersenne Cousins, " as the 51 prime numbers presented as power of two minus one unit are named and named after him. Marin Mersenne, a friar who was known for his studies in the field of mathematics, theology, music theory, and philosophy between the 16th and 17th centuries.

What is surprising is that it took Laroch "just" 4 months to reach the figure - the predecessor's discovery took more than 2 decades to come. The verification of the new number was done by two mathematicians using three softwares, a process that took 6 days.

You can download the number in an 11 MB zip file (!!) directly from the GIMPS website.