Largest Known Prime Number Discovered
Luke Durant found the largest prime number in October of 2024. It contains 41,024,320 digits. The number was 2136279841-1 on GIMPS.
Luke Durant, a 36-year-old NVIDIA employee, used GPUs to conclude that 2136279841-1 is prime. Durant is a member of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS). GIMPS has named this number M136279841 instead of the actual number (because the actual amount would be too large to write). Durant’s number beats the previous number (discovered in 2016) in digits, by 16,000,000 digits. He was in a line at the airport when he found that one of his supercomputers had come out with a number that was probably prime. He says he “wasn’t as excited as I could be about finding the number.”