JAN.

5, 2018 AT 12:42 PM

We Have A New Prime Number, And It’s 23

Million Digits Long
By Oliver Roeder

Filed under Math

Somewhere out there on the number line, huge prime numbers are lurking, waiting to
be discovered. On Wednesday, a new one was. The Great Internet Mersenne Prime
Search, an organization devoted to doing exactly what its name suggests, announced
that it had discovered a new prime number, the largest ever found: 2 77,232,917
− 1 .
That’s more than 77 million 2s all multiplied together, minus 1. I’d write it all out for
you, but there’s a big problem: It’s 23,249,425 digits long. (So, it goes by its
nickname: M77232917.)

Instead of writing it out, I’ll offer this chart, which shows how long the longest known
prime has been over time. (We’ve charted it on a log scale so we can more easily
compare the huge range of numbers.)
A prime number is a number that is divisible only by itself and one. These numbers
play an important role in pure mathematics and its field of number theory. Emphasis
on pure. The British mathematician G. H. Hardy once proudly wrote that number
theory was so free of practical application that “no one has yet discovered any warlike
purpose to be served by the theory of numbers.” (That has changed recently, however,
as primes now play an important role in cryptography.)

Mathematicians have been searching for primes for centuries, often with no more
than a quill and a brain. By 1588, an Italian mathematician had proved that 524,287,
or 219
, was prime. By 1772, the legendary Leonhard Euler had shown that
− 1

2,147,483,647, or 231
, was, too.
− 1

Then came the computer. You can clearly see the dawn of the computer age in the
chart above. Over the course of the past 70 years or so, the longest known prime has
become thousands and thousands of times longer. Supercomputers have been a boon
for prime hunters. The discovery of longer primes has gone hand in hand with the
development of faster and more powerful processors.

Today, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search project relies on distributed
computing to hunt its mammoths. As with similar projects for folding proteins or
searching for extraterrestrials, volunteers download custom prime-searching software
and donate their spare computing power to the project. One such volunteer, Jonathan
Pace, discovered M77232917 on his machine the day after Christmas. He’d been
searching for 14 years. It took six days to prove that the number was indeed prime.

M77232917 is certainly not the largest prime number. In fact, there is no largest prime
number. There are infinitely many — a fact established by the Greek mathematician
Euclid around 300 B.C. Fascinating open questions about prime numbers do remain,
such as the Goldbach conjecture (which wonders if every even integer above two can
be expressed as the sum of two primes) and a twin prime conjecture (which wonders
if there are an infinite number of pairs of primes separated by 2, like 11 and 13).

But finding an even more enormous prime won’t prove these mathematical ideas. So
why hunt? Reasons provided by the prime search project include tradition, collection,
glory and money. It lists a $250,000 prize for the first billion-digit prime. Happy
hunting.