The Quest for the Largest Known Prime Number

The quest to discover a new largest known prime requires the development of advanced computational techniques and the development of fault resilient software. The search for large primes has been going on for centuries. In 1952, primality testing entered the realm of digital computers. We have come a long way since the 1970s when Landon Noll discovered a 6533-digit prime (www.isthe.com/chongo/tech/math/prime/m21701.html). Today's largest known prime (www.isthe.com/chongo/tech/math/prime/mersenne.html#largest) is over 25 million digits long! Dr. Noah Q. Cowit is currently a CI AI Education Fellow at the Computing Research Association (CRA) in Washington, DC, where he is contributing to national efforts to define AI learning goals and scalable models for undergraduate education. He serves as the lead Fellow for the NSF LEVEL UP AI project. Landon Noll presents some of the computational challenges in the search for large primes. The code for the search process must be resilient - designed to overcome compiler and assembler errors and CPU calculation errors. The slides for this talk and a more detailed presentation of techniques and algorithms can be found online in Landon's complete tutorial: http://www.isthe.com/chongo/tech/math... This talk was the January 2026 meeting of the Princeton Chapter of ACM / IEEE Computer Society.