Ultimate Prime: UCLA Researchers have Discovered a New Number 13 Million Digits Long

Researchers at UCLA have discovered a prime so gigantic it makes Optimus look like a noble speck of dust. Put it this way: imagine every atom in the universe.  Now imagine that every one of those atoms was an entire universe, and every atom in each of those was another entire universe like some vast cosmic Matroyshka doll.  The total number of atoms in that fractal universe assemblange would still only be about two hundred and fifty digits long.

What we're trying to say is you can't imagine a number that big without your brain popping and leaking out your ears.  Even writing it out would take two and a half months, and that's assuming you're so excited by numbers you don't need to sleep or eat - in which case you're probably too busy escaping from 60's Batman in your Calculator-mobile anyway.

Prime numbers are numbers which can only be divided by themselves or one - for example, seven is a prime but eight isn't.  As numbers get bigger, there are more and more potential factors which can divide them - finding a prime at the thirteen million digit level is on par with finding a winning lotto ticket wrapped around a needle in an Empire State building-sized haystack.

This isn't just any prime number larger than the population of Greece, either - it's a "Mersenne prime", a special class of number which can be written as two to the power of another prime, minus one.  This one is 2^43,112,609-1 - which is pretty handy for those who don't want to spend those two and a half months scribbling down the longhand version.

The Mersenne primes are named for a French scholar from the 17th century who amazingly came up with a list of hundreds of them two centuries before they would be verified.  Since he was a tad early for computer assistance and likely spent longer on the task than we've spent on anything, ever, we can forgive him for getting a few wrong.

So why come up with more primes, apart from the sheer human awesomeness - the curiosity can-do that comes from looking at an equation-based Everest and thinking "We can do that!"  Well, this super-sized sum has secured a much smaller (but perhaps more understandable) for the researchers - one hundred thousand dollars from the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search.

GIMPS http://www.mersenne.org/