Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Prime numbers are those ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. For many people, prime numbers have faded into the background since distant grade school days. However, for Luke Durant, a 36-year ...

A Missouri professor, one of a team of nearly 100,000 volunteers, has found a highly unusual 17 million digit number -- and brought a prime-hunting project closer to a $150,000 prize. Stephen ...

Ever hear of a Mersenne prime? These are prime numbers that are one less than a power of two. Named after Marin Mersenne, a French Minim friar, who studied them in the early 17th century, there is a ...

University of California, Los Angeles, mathematicians appear to have won a $100,000 prize from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for discovering a 12.9-million-digit prime number that has long ...

At the end of this post, I made a totally naive guess that the recently discovered candidate to be the $latex M_ {45}$, the 45th Mersenne prime, would have 10.5 million digits.

Meet the new largest known prime number. It starts with a 4, continues on for 23 million digits, then ends with a 1. As is true with all prime numbers, it can only be evenly divided by one and itself.