Because no one, not even a mathematician, has the time to recite 23 million digits, the number was given the not-so-catchy name of M77232917. (But its friends call it 2 to the power of 77,232,917 ...

Three is a Mersenne prime because it is a prime and is equal to 2 2 – 1. Other Mersenne primes include 7, 31, 127, and 8191. There are only fifty known in total, with the last sixteen discovered ...

The program searches for a type of prime number known as a Mersenne prime, a prime number that can be described by subtracting the number 1 from a given number of 2's multiplied together.

At an insane 41,024,320 decimal digits in length, writing the entire number would take months to write in full. To keep things brief – if a little harder to appreciate – it is 1 fewer than the result ...

The largest prime number to date has been discovered by the researchers at the University of Central Michigan – it’s got more than 22 million digits, or almost 5 million digits larger than the ...

On October 11, Mr. Durant’s system flagged M136279841 as a potential prime number using the Fermat probable prime test. The test calculates the chance a given number is prime using an old theorem.