The largest prime number with 17 million digits was found

Ever since Euclid proved the existence of an infinite number of prime numbers, mathematicians of all countries have rushed to find the greatest of them.

As of today, the expression 2 ^57885161 - 1, being the largest prime number, is of extreme interest to mathematicians.

Prime numbers are such numbers that divide by themselves and by one, for example, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, etc. A prime number with 17 million digits was discovered in Warrensburg, Missouri, thanks to distributed information and computing networks under the GIMPS project, where tens of thousands of computers have been working since 1996. The previous prime number was discovered in 2008 and consisted of 13 million digits.

Mathematicians have gone on the hunt for prime numbers not just because they are (or will be) useful, but because they are. The largest prime number is a token that is used as a measure of the power of distributed information-computing networks.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation campaign has already awarded cash prizes for discovering a prime number with 1 million, 10 million digits. The first discoverers of a prime number with 100 million digits will receive a prize of 150 thousand dollars.

It is most convenient to look for the so-called Mersenne prime numbers, named after the 17th-century French monk. These are such prime numbers that can be represented as the expression 2 ^р - 1, where р - is a prime number. Before the work on the GIMPS project, 34 prime numbers were known. Now the number has grown to 48.

A new greatest prime number was discovered by Curtis Cooper, a scientist
from the University of Central Missouri, which used 1,000 university computers as part of the GIMPS project. The number found was so large that one of the computers worked continuously for 39 days to check the correctness of the result.

^{Based on foreign press for ForTrader.org}