TECHNOLOGY
THE LARGEST KNOWN PRIME NUMBER, SPANNING 41 MILLION DIGITS, IS DISCOVERED
WORDS BEN TURNER
The largest known prime number has been discovered by an amateur researcher and former Nvidia employee. The new number is 2136,279,841-1, which beats the previous title holder, 282,589,933-1 by more than 16 million digits. Prime numbers, described by mathematicians as the ‘atoms of integers,’ are numbers that are divisible only by themselves and one. The smallest prime numbers are 2, 3, 5, 7 and 11. Prime numbers run to infinity, but finding them becomes harder the bigger they get.