A 41-million-digit prime number is the biggest ever found—but mathematicians' search for perfection will continue
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Imagine a number made up of a vast string of ones: 1111111…111. Specifically, 136,279,841 ones in a row. If we stacked up that many sheets of paper, the resulting tower would stretch into the stratosphere.
If we write this number in a computer in binary form (using only ones and zeroes), it would fill up only about 16 megabytes, no more than a short video clip. Converting to the more familiar way of writing numbers in decimal, this number—it starts out 8,816,943,275… and ends …076,706,219,486,871,551—would have more than 41 million digits. It would fill 20,000 pages in a book.
First, it's a prime number (meaning it is only divisible by itself and one). Second, it's what is called a Mersenne prime (we'll get to what that means). And third, it is to date the largest prime number ever discovered in a mathematical quest with a history going back more than 2,000 years.
