Maths fans can’t get enough of numbers that are millions of digits long and can only be divided by themselves and one. Now, through a collaborative effort, utilising computers distributed around the ...

There’s a new largest known prime number in town, with a whopping 23,249,425 digits. The figure is calculated by multiplying 2 by itself 77,232,917 times and then subtracting 1. Announced on January 3 ...

Mathematicians have unveiled a new record-breaking prime number: 2 74,207,281 – 1. It’s now the highest prime number ever discovered, eclipsing the previous record by 5 million. The prime’s discoverer ...

Somewhere out there on the number line, huge prime numbers are lurking, waiting to be discovered. On Wednesday, a new one was. The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, an organization devoted to ...

Luke Durant was folding his laundry right into his suitcase ahead of a trip back home to Alabama when he decided to check his computer and see if he had made history. He figured that, like every other ...

(CNN) — For many people, prime numbers have faded into the background since distant grade school days. However, for Luke Durant, a 36-year-old former Nvidia programmer, prime numbers became an ...

Luke Durant, a 36 year-old researcher and former NVIDIA employee, used a free program, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), to identify the new prime through an advanced algorithm. The ...

Numbers might not sound like they need discovering, but a crowd-sourced project has now identified the largest prime number known. The number was discovered by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search ...

The largest prime number ever has been discovered and it's massively longer than the previously largest prime number known to man. In fact, the new biggest prime is a whopping five million digits ...