<p> A computer has helped scientists discover the largest prime number ever with over 22 million digits, breaking the previous record by approximately 5 million digits.<br /><br /></p>.<p>A team at the University of Central Missouri, headed by Curtis Cooper also held the old record, they have actually broken the record four times.<br /><br />Cooper and his team are part of the The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) collaboration, an effort by a lot of volunteers to find ever larger prime numbers - or, more specifically, a particular class of prime numbers that are called Mersenne, where it is one less than a power of two.<br /><br />Cooper said he was notified by an email sent by the software running on a personal computer (PC) that the prime number, written as 2^74,207,281 - 1, had been found.<br /><br />The find came after a month of number crunching on a single Intel based PC. Interestingly, the PC tried to notify Cooper and his team about the find back in September last year, but a glitch prevented it from being sent.<br /><br />It was only during a maintenance cycle that the message reporting the prime number found, was sent. The official discovery date is January 7th, 'Phys.org' reported.<br /><br />The search for new and bigger prime numbers is conducted using software developed by the GIMPS team, called prime95 - it grinds away, day after day, until a new prime number is found.<br /><br />While the numbers that it finds are of interest, they no longer serve much of any practical use, the software has been used for other purposes though - it has found flaws in Intel CPUs, for example.<br /><br />The new prime number has been named M74207281 and the team says that it was "calculated by multiplying together 74,207,281 twos then subtracting one."<br /><br />It has already been tested and confirmed by three different independent teams running software on different machines</p>
<p> A computer has helped scientists discover the largest prime number ever with over 22 million digits, breaking the previous record by approximately 5 million digits.<br /><br /></p>.<p>A team at the University of Central Missouri, headed by Curtis Cooper also held the old record, they have actually broken the record four times.<br /><br />Cooper and his team are part of the The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) collaboration, an effort by a lot of volunteers to find ever larger prime numbers - or, more specifically, a particular class of prime numbers that are called Mersenne, where it is one less than a power of two.<br /><br />Cooper said he was notified by an email sent by the software running on a personal computer (PC) that the prime number, written as 2^74,207,281 - 1, had been found.<br /><br />The find came after a month of number crunching on a single Intel based PC. Interestingly, the PC tried to notify Cooper and his team about the find back in September last year, but a glitch prevented it from being sent.<br /><br />It was only during a maintenance cycle that the message reporting the prime number found, was sent. The official discovery date is January 7th, 'Phys.org' reported.<br /><br />The search for new and bigger prime numbers is conducted using software developed by the GIMPS team, called prime95 - it grinds away, day after day, until a new prime number is found.<br /><br />While the numbers that it finds are of interest, they no longer serve much of any practical use, the software has been used for other purposes though - it has found flaws in Intel CPUs, for example.<br /><br />The new prime number has been named M74207281 and the team says that it was "calculated by multiplying together 74,207,281 twos then subtracting one."<br /><br />It has already been tested and confirmed by three different independent teams running software on different machines</p>