#mathsonamug #maths pic.twitter.com/REPJ4xFhT9
— Dr. Sean (@seanelvidge) January 22, 2016
Primes. Primes. Primes. The hunt continually goes on for the next biggest. Well, yesterday, we found a new largest. \(2^{74207281}-1\) is the 49th Mersenne Prime that has been found. It is 22,338,618 digits long (click the link to download the whole number, be warned though, the file is 10 MB). It was found using the Great Internet Prime Search (GIMPS) and surpasses the previous record by over 5,000,000 digits. GIMPS admit that “This prime is too large to currently be of practical value”.