Largest Known Prime 2^136,279,841−1 Discovered with Over 41 Million Digits, Surpassing Record by 16 Million

Oct 22, 2024, 09:52 AM

The largest known prime number, 2^136,279,841−1, has been discovered, setting a new record with over 41 million digits. This Mersenne prime (2ᵖ-1) was found using the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) software, marking the first time a Mersenne prime has been discovered using GPUs. The discovery was made by Luke Durant, a former Nvidia software engineer from San Jose, California, utilizing an NVIDIA A100 GPU located in Dublin, Ireland. This new prime surpasses the previous record by 16 million digits and took nearly six years to find since the last largest known prime was identified. The discovery was confirmed on October 11 and would take over 5000 tweets to write out.