Curtis Cooper, a mathematician of the Central University of Missouri (USA) discovered on 7 January, the largest prime number, known "Mersenne" and equivalent to 2^(74207281) -1 and contains more than 22.3 million digits, reports The New Scientist.
This prime number was discovered as part of the GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) project. It is a shared calculation project in the form of software and is used by Internet users to search for the largest prime numbers of Mersenne.
These numbers named in honor of Marin Mersenne, a French mathematician (sixteenth century), are in the form 2^p -1, where "p" is also a prime number. The interest of writing a number in this form is that one can easily check whether it is prime or not.
We know only 49 prime numbers of Mersenne, the last fifteen being discovered thanks to the GIMPS project. There is nevertheless an infinite number of Mersenne prime numbers. Note that their discovery is useful for detecting computer bugs.
For the latest prime numbers research, one may consult the following website:
http://www.mersenne.org/prime.htm
