Amateur sleuth finds largest known prime number with 41 million digits
The largest prime number is now 16 million digits longer than the previous record found in 2018, thanks to an amateur hunter and his large collection of high-power graphics cards
By Matthew Sparkes
22 October 2024
There is a new largest known prime
Panther Media GmbH/Alamy
After a six-year drought, we now have a new largest known prime number, thanks to an amateur mathematics sleuth who deployed an army of graphics processing units (GPUs) to crunch through the possibilities.
Prime numbers are those divisible only by 1 and themselves, such as 2, 3 and 5. There are an infinite number of primes, but proving which numbers are actually prime becomes harder the larger they get. We can now add 2136,279,841-1 to the list, which at 41,024,320 decimal digits long is the biggest prime number currently known.
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It was discovered by a relatively new member of a group called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), where thousands of people have downloaded software to hunt for prime numbers. Those lucky enough to discover one earn a place in prime number history, but also a $3000 prize. This is the first prize to be awarded since 2018.
The new prime number, labelled by the GIMPS group as M136279841, was found by Luke Durant, who formerly worked for Nvidia as an engineer developing GPUs, and has been searching for big primes for just under a year.
All previous GIMPS discoveries were made by computer CPUs in relatively humble personal computers, but Durant’s past at Nvidia exposed him to GPUs – the chips originally designed for powering computer games but also key to the recent rise in AI computing. He believed they would be ideal for hunting prime numbers and took advantage of a GPU system for its number-crunching abilities. He networked thousands of GPUs housed in 24 data centres across 17 countries, and has been described by the GIMPS project as a “prolific contributor”.
