If no other primes can divide it evenly, it must be a new prime number. All you need to do is divide it by all primes smaller than itself. Determining if a number is a prime is conceptually simple. "What's special about this prime isn't that it's prime, it's that we actually know it's prime," writes Lemke Oliver.
After its discovery, M77232917 was verified as a prime number by Blosser and three other people-David Stanfill, Andreas Höglund, and Ernst Mayer-each using different software and computer setups. Developed by George Woltman, the software tests candidate numbers as part of a search coordinated by PrimeNet system software, which was written by Scott Kurowski and maintained by Aaron Blosser.
A computer owned by Jonathan Pace, an electrical engineer living in Tennessee, identified the number using specialized Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) software. "It happens that among numbers with 1000 digits, about one in every 2500 will be prime," he writes in an email to .ĭiscovering the new primewas a group effort. This helps researchers predict how many primes will exist within a range of numbers, explains Robert Lemke Oliver, a mathematician at Tuffts Univerisity. These faint patterns are enough to help narrow the search for new prime numbers. And like all prime numbers, it appears to be random, although some researchers suggest that faint patterns shape the distribution of prime numbers. When M77232917 is written out as all 23,249,425 digits, the number contains every digit from zero through nine roughly 2.3 million times each. According to Caldwell, the gap between Mersenne primes is usually much larger. But that would be surprising, says Chris Caldwell, a mathematician who tracks the discovery of large prime numbers. While it’s the fiftieth Mersenne prime discovered, not all candidates between the last two primes have yet been checked so another could be lurking between them. The number-which can be written in shorthand as M77232917-is nearly one million digits longer than the last confirmed prime discovered in 2016. This pattern creates a countable (although still enormous) list of candidate Mersenne prime numbers. Named after the French theologian and mathematician Marin Mersenne, these types of primes are always calculated as a power of two minus one. This format of calculation means the new prime is considered a Mersenne prime. In mathematical terms that is: 2 77,232,917 - 1. The newest prime number is generated by multiplying two by itself 77,232,917 times, then subtracting one. "Each new prime is an extension of the bounds of human mathematical knowledge," Hartree Centre researcher Iain Bethune, who is part the prime number hunting project PrimeGrid, which was not involved in the new find, writes in an email to. And while finding larger prime numbers doesn't necessarily mean stronger encryption (that's a common misconception) human curiosity drives the continual quest to find ever-larger primes. Prime numbers are essential to modern life, used in everything from securely encrypting banking information to the random number generators used by visual effects specialists for the latest movies.
As is true with all prime numbers, it can only be evenly divided by one and itself. It starts with a 4, continues on for 23 million digits, then ends with a 1.