(CNN) — 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 ...

Luke Durant was folding his laundry right into his suitcase ahead of a trip back home to Alabama when he decided to check his computer and see if he had made history. He figured that, like every other ...

Prime numbers, whole numbers greater than one with only two factors (one and themselves), are fundamental in mathematics.

The largest prime number ever has been discovered and it's massively longer than the previously largest prime number known to man. In fact, the new biggest prime is a whopping five million digits ...

Numbers might not sound like they need discovering, but a crowd-sourced project has now identified the largest prime number known. The number was discovered by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search ...

The record number, nicknamed M74207281, has more than 20 million digits. That's nearly 5 million digits longer than the previous record. If you printed each digit 1 mm wide, the number would stretch ...

Update, Jan. 4, 2018: On Wednesday, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search announced that a computer owned by Jonathan Pace in Germantown, Tennessee, discovered a new prime number. At 23,249,425 ...

Mathematicians have unveiled a new record-breaking prime number: 2 74,207,281 – 1. It’s now the highest prime number ever discovered, eclipsing the previous record by 5 million. The prime’s discoverer ...

It’s time for a new prime to shine. The largest known prime number is now 2 74,207,281 – 1, smashing the previous record by nearly 5 million digits. This mathematical monster was discovered by Curtis ...

A computer at the University of Central Missouri has calculated the world's largest prime number, coming in at 22,338,618 digits and surpassing the previous record by nearly 5 million digits. Prime ...