Largest Known Prime Number Found

Mathematicians at UCLA have discovered the largest known prime number, which is 13 million-digits long. This discovery was made using a network of 75 PCs running GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) on Windows XP and was verified on a different system with a different algorithm. "Hi, I'm a PC and I just found the largest known Mersenne prime."

Mersenne primes — named for their discoverer, 17th century French mathematician Marin Mersenne — are expressed as 2P-1, or two to the power of "P" minus one. P is itself a prime number. For the new prime, P is 43,112,609.

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