- More than 2 years ago
The roster of prime numbers—those numbers divisible only by 1 and themselves—has a new top dog. On Feb. 18, the computer-based Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) turned up the largest known prime number, whose formula is 2 to the 25,964,951st power minus 1. The new prime is a whopping 7,816,230 digits long, making it more than half-a-million digits longer than the previous record-holder.