Well it's the largest prime number found so far, there will of course be larger ones since Euclid proved that there must be an infinite number of prime numbers. The current highest prime was discovered by Curtis Cooper, a researcher from University of Central Missouri, as part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (Gimps) project - a distributed computing project involving tens of thousands of computers. The previous highest prime was discovered by Gimps in 2008, but it was a mere 13m digits long, whereas the number above is 17m digits long.
I'd buy that on a t-shirt!
ReplyDeleteprobably be out of date/fashion in a few months which actually suits me ;-)