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.”
Prime numbers are numbers that cannot be divided by any other integer other than itself and one. Primes have interested mathematicians for centuries. Among the most famous studiers of prime numbers is French monk Marin Mersenne (1588–1648 CE). Mersenne is known for trying to find formula for all the prime numbers in the world. He failed on the attempt to find the formula but did find a way to find prime numbers. His formula says that 2x-1 is prime if x is prime. This can be seen in the number 2136279841-1. These primes are now called Mersenne primes.
Durant thought that the GPUs (Graphics processing unit) he helped design could be more useful than just for artificial Intelligence (AI). He thought that looking for big, Mersenne primes would be the perfect way to prove this. Durant’s discovery stopped the 28-year trend of home computers finding these new primes. His prime is the 52nd Mersenne prime to be found.
Durant has been awarded a US$3,000 (A$4,530) prize which he says he will donate to the Alabama School of Math and Science’s maths department. Everyone can be a part of GIMPS so why not try finding some large, prime, numbers yourself?