A FedEx employee named Jonathan Pace has discovered the largest prime number known thus far. It has 23,249,425 digits. Like all primes, it has no factors other than itself and 1. Pace found it as part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), where volunteers run software on their computers to crunch numbers. Pace had the program running for 14 years before finding this prime!
Mersenne numbers are all based on subtracting 1 from 2 to the power of n, where n is an integer. Not all Mersenne numbers are prime, but many are.
“Discovering something new is exciting,” says Seth Schoen from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, California. This nonprofit organization gives prizes for discovering prime numbers, which are helpful in computer programming.