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It’s sort of ridiculous that it’s possible for really big numbers to be prime. Any number bigger than, say, a billion has no business having only two factors. I mean, come on.
By BBC News Online science editor Dr David Whitehouse:
The largest prime number yet discovered has just been revealed to the world.
There are more primes out there
George Woltman, Gimps founder
The new number, expressed as 213,466,917-1, contains 4,053,946 digits and would take the best part of three weeks to write out longhand.
The prime number - a number that can only be divided by one and itself - was discovered by Michael Cameron, a 20-year-old Canadian participant in a mass computer project known as the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (Gimps).
Mersenne primes are important for the theory of numbers and they may help in developing unbreakable codes and message encryptions.
The Gimps project spent 13,000 years of computer time to find the new prime number.
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