Implications mathematical, theoretical, and philosophical, and much to delight the mind. But there's also something that simply gladdens the heart in seeing a milestone successfully reached through communal effort and shared commitment.



Mersenne Project Discovers Largest Known Prime Number

on World-Wide Volunteer Computer Grid



Number Found with 25,000 Years of Computer Time



ORLANDO, Florida - December 2, 2003 -- Michael Shafer, a 26 year-old volunteer in the Mersenne.org research project called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), has discovered the largest known prime number. Shafer used a Michigan State University lab PC and free software by George Woltman and Scott Kurowski as part of an international grid of 211,000 networked computers in virtually every time zone of the world.



The new number, expressed as 2 to the 20,996,011th power minus 1, has 6,320,430 decimal digits and was discovered November 17th. It is more than two million digits larger than the previous largest known prime number, and belongs to a special class of rare prime numbers called Mersenne primes . The discovery marks only the 40th known Mersenne prime, named after Marin Mersenne, a 17th century French monk who first studied the numbers 300 years ago.