Curtis Cooper at the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg has found the largest prime number yet.
(He hasn't found the largest prime as there is no such thing -- he's just found a new prime that is larger than any other primes people have found.)
It is a Mersenne prime, which means it is of the form 2P − 1, where P itself is prime. The one Cooper found is 257,885,161 − 1, and it has 17 million digits!!
So no, I'm not going to type it out here! Writing it in the form 257,885,161 − 1 is way handier, isn't it? Shows us how important exponents are. So, this new prime is 2 multiplied by itself 57,885,161 times, and then you subtract 1.
This is what Cooper himself says about the hunt for new primes:
"Every time I find one it is incredible," Cooper said. "I kind of consider it like climbing Mount Everest or finding a really rare diamond or landing somebody on the moon. It's an accomplishment. It's a scientific feat."
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