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The table below lists the largest currently known prime numbers and probable primes (PRPs) as tracked by the PrimePages and by Henri & Renaud Lifchitz's PRP Records. Numbers with more than 2,000,000 digits are shown.
This is a list of articles about prime numbers. A prime number (or prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that has no positive divisors other than 1 and itself. By Euclid's theorem, there are an infinite number of prime numbers. Subsets of the prime numbers may be generated with various formulas for primes.
The following table lists the progression of the largest known prime number in ascending order. [3] Here M p = 2 p − 1 is the Mersenne number with exponent p, where p is a prime number. The longest record-holder known was M 19 = 524,287, which was the largest known prime for 144 years. No records are known prior to 1456.
For many people, prime numbers have faded into the background since distant grade school days. However, for Luke Durant, a 36-year-old former Nvidia programmer, prime numbers became an all ...
As of October 2024 the largest known prime number is a Mersenne prime with 41,024,320 decimal digits. [1] [2] There are infinitely many primes, as demonstrated by Euclid around 300 BC. No known simple formula separates prime numbers from composite numbers.
For example, 3 is a Mersenne prime as it is a prime number and is expressible as 2 2 − 1. [1] [2] The numbers p corresponding to Mersenne primes must themselves be prime, although the vast majority of primes p do not lead to Mersenne primes—for example, 2 11 − 1 = 2047 = 23 × 89. [3]
To put in perspective the size of a googol, the mass of an electron, just under 10-30 kg, can be compared to the mass of the visible universe, estimated at between 10 50 and 10 60 kg. [5] It is a ratio in the order of about 10 80 to 10 90 , or at most one ten-billionth of a googol (0.00000001% of a googol).
By 1772, Leonhard Euler had proven that 2,147,483,647 is a prime. The number 2147483647 is the eighth Mersenne prime, equal to 2 31 − 1. It is one of only four known double Mersenne primes. [1] The primality of this number was proven by Leonhard Euler, who reported the proof in a letter to Daniel Bernoulli written in 1772. [2]