The largest known prime number is 2136,279,841 − 1, which was discovered on October 12, 2024. It has 41,024,320 digits.
Luke Durant, an amateur “prime-hunter”, found the number using a cloud-based virtual machine he volunteered to the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS). Durant combined the GIMPS community’s software and cloud computers to create a fast supercomputer.
The number is a Mersenne prime, which is a prime number that can be expressed as 2p-1. It’s the 52nd Mersenne prime to be discovered, and the first in almost six years from the GIMPS.
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