The catalog of humongous prime numbers has a new entry–the champion prime (220996011 – 1), which has 6,320,430 decimal digits. It’s the largest known prime number and the 40th Mersenne prime ever found. A prime is a whole number (other than 1) that is evenly divisible by only itself and 1.
Written in the form 2p – 1, where the exponent p is a prime number, Mersenne numbers hold a special place in the never-ending pursuit of larger and larger primes.