ROBERT BROOK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Maths fans can’t get enough of numbers that are millions of digits long and can only be divided by themselves and one. Now, through a collaborative effort, utilising computers distributed around the world, they’ve discovered that the number 277,232,917 – 1 is prime.
The discovery was initially made on 26th December by a computer volunteered by Jonathan Pace, as part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS). Pace, a 51-year old electrical engineer based in Germantown, Tennessee, has been hunting primes for over fourteen years and his belated Christmas present is eligible for a $3,000 reward from GIMPS.
The new prime number, known as M77232917, is one million digits larger than the previous record. It is also a particularly rare type of prime called a Mersenne prime, meaning that it is