Researchers Find Largest Prime Number

January 4th, 2006 · by David Bradley

It’s not something we could have considered overlooking, so the New Year Entry in the significant figures blog draws your attention to a prime sig fig reported by Forbes [link now dead, but try here for info, it’s the world’s largest prime number so far.

The number, found by a Missouri team, is 9.1 million digits long and is a Mersenne prime with the label M30402457 - that’s 2 to the 30,402,457th power minus 1.

What’s odd is that the discovery was made by Missouri U chemist Steven Boone and colleague Curtis Cooper and their team. “We’re super excited,” Boone told journalists, “We’ve been looking for such a number for a long time.”

4 responses so far ↓

bill funk // Jan 7, 2008 at 3:20 pm

since most of us agree that there are an infinite number of numbers, wouldn’t it be logical that there are an infinite number of prime numbers?
David Bradley // Jan 7, 2008 at 4:28 pm

Bill, what may at first appear logical need not be so. There may be some huge prime number after which some kind of mathematical patterns emerges after which there are no more bigger prime numbers. I don’t think there is yet a mathematical proof that demonstrates that not to be so. Correct me if I’m wrong.

db
Bennett // Feb 9, 2008 at 10:29 am

There are an infinite number of prime numbers. A href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number#There_are_infinitely_many_prime_numbers”>Wikipedia has a nice summary of proofs. I think mathematicians just like to find bigger and bigger ones because it’s a challenge.

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David Bradley // Feb 11, 2008 at 3:22 pm

Bennett, exactly.

db