Because no one, not even a mathematician, has the time to recite 23 million digits, the number was given the not-so-catchy name of M77232917. (But its friends call it 2 to the power of 77,232,917 ...

The program searches for a type of prime number known as a Mersenne prime, a prime number that can be described by subtracting the number 1 from a given number of 2's multiplied together.

The number he found, given the unstimulating name M136279841, is one of those figures so outlandishly large that it doesn’t sound real. It has 41,024,320 decimal digits. If someone read off the entire ...

This is the largest number known to be prime — it has 22,338,618 digits — though as mentioned above, there are infinitely many prime numbers, so larger ones exist. Recommended video Read next ...

On October 11, Mr. Durant’s system flagged M136279841 as a potential prime number using the Fermat probable prime test. The test calculates the chance a given number is prime using an old theorem.

Using a computer powered by an off-the-shelf Intel Core i5-6600 processor, a FedEx employee from Tennessee has discovered the largest prime number known to humanity. At 23,249,425 digits long, it ...