the quest for the largest prime number #primenumber

Prime numbers are the loners of arithmetic: whole numbers greater than one that cannot be evenly divided by anything except one and themselves. They start small—two, three, five, seven, eleven—but refuse to settle into a tidy pattern. More than two thousand years ago, Euclid proved there are infinitely many primes, so there can never be a final one. The hunt, then, is for the largest known prime: the biggest one humans have verified so far. Proof is the hard part; finding a factor is easy, showing none exist is not. Most record winners are Mersenne primes, built as two to the power p minus one, because they can be tested efficiently. The current champion is two to the power one hundred thirty-six million two hundred seventy-nine thousand eight hundred forty-one minus one, discovered on October twelfth, twenty twenty-four by Luke Durant, with forty-one million twenty-four thousand three hundred twenty digits. Music: Tunesphere Band