A 36-year-old man, who earlier worked as a programmer for Nvidia, spent around a year of his life and invested a considerable amount of money to discover the world’s largest known prime number.
Officially named as ‘M136279841,’ Luke Durant’s discovery consists of 41,024,320 digits, marking the maiden prime breakthrough in nearly six years, CNN reported.
A prime number is a whole number, which can only be divided by 1 or itself, such as 2, 3, 5, 7, and so on.
Based in San Jose, California, Luke Durant’s historic finding has been classified as a Mersenne prime, named after French monk Marin Mersenne. He studied these numbers over 350 years ago.
As per the report, Mersenne primes are rare, making Durant’s discovery even more impressive. In simple terms, to consider a number as Mersenne prime, it needs to be written in the form ‘2ᵖ-1’.
While other large prime numbers are used in some applications for protecting internet security, the Mersenne primes remain crucial for other key reasons.
“The historical record of the world’s largest prime tells us something about the historical capability of computers, and in particular it tells us something about the progress of humanity in this area,” CNN quoted Dr Kevin Buzzard, professor of pure mathematics at Imperial College, London, as saying.
Mr Durant’s research was announced on October 21 by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a community-based project.
An example of citizen science, GIMPS allows non-specialists to discover the largest known primes, according to Buzzard “I recognised that the GIMPS community has put together an incredible system with amazing technology for searching for huge prime numbers,” Mr Durant said.
For this project, Luke Durant first got himself familiar with its software and learned to use cloud computers. Later on, he combined these elements that enabled him to run enough worldwide systems for creating an incredibly speedy supercomputer.
People from different cities around the world are volunteers in the GIMPS community as they run the project’s software on their personal computer systems to search for new primes.
Luke Durant was inspired to hunt for the world’s largest primes due to his interest in developing large computing systems as well as exploring the limitations of the laws of physics. Through his effort, he “wanted to push the boundaries of the known universe in whatever small way I was able”.
“These enormous prime numbers are, in some senses, the largest ‘unique pieces of information’ in the known universe,” he said.