GIMPS celebrated its 20th anniversary with the math discovery of the new largest known prime number.

GIMPS celebrated its 20th anniversary with the math discovery of the new largest known prime number.
2^74,207,281 - 1 is a 22,338,618 digit prime number discovered by Curtis Cooper of the University of Central Missouri.

If you aren't aware of GIMPS, it is a distributed computing project in which volunteers load the software on their computers to be run in the background or during idle time for essentially brute force calculations. Since beginning in 1996, the project has increased the number of known Mersenne Primes from 34 to 49.

Article:
http://www.mersenne.org/primes/?press=M74207281

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