An amateur researcher and former Nvidia employee, Luke Durant, has uncovered the world’s largest known prime number: 2**136,279,841 – 1, surpassing the previous record-holder (2**82,589,933 – 1) by over 16 million digits.

Prime numbers, indivisible by any other number except 1 and themselves, are considered the “atoms of integers” in mathematics, with smaller examples being 2, 3, 5, and 7. Though primes extend to infinity, finding them becomes increasingly complex as the numbers grow larger. Durant’s discovery was made using the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a free software program designed specifically for identifying large prime numbers. The search for this new prime involved thousands of GPUs operating across 24 data centers in 17 countries—a setup that marks a new era in prime discovery, as past large primes were found primarily with personal computers.

This newly confirmed prime, with a staggering 41,024,320 digits, is also the 52nd known Mersenne prime. Named after Marin Mersenne, a 17th-century French monk, Mersenne primes are found by subtracting 1 from a power of 2. This method, while not the only way to identify primes, has proven efficient in isolating extremely large prime numbers.

While there are limited practical applications for these enormous primes, their potential role in cryptography has justified their pursuit. In a statement, the GIMPS team noted that a few decades ago, large primes seemed to lack utility—until cryptographic algorithms harnessed their unique properties.

For his discovery, Durant earned a $3,000 reward from GIMPS. The search for even larger primes continues, with substantial cash prizes awaiting the first individuals to discover a hundred-million-digit or billion-digit prime, worth $150,000 and $250,000, respectively.

By Impact Lab