Feb 7 2013

New Largest Prime Number Discovered.

A U.S. mathematician used a giant network of computers to find a new prime number–17,425,170 digits long.

The largest prime number that has been discovered was 17,425,170 digits long. The new prime number crushes the previous one discovered in 2008, which was a paltry 12,978,189 digits long. Number 2 raised to the 57,885,161 power minus 1 — was discovered by University of Central Missouri mathematician Curtis Cooper as part of a giant network of volunteer computers devoted to finding the prime number.The total computing power to find it was 360,000 processors operating at 150 trillion calculations per second.