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World's Largest Known Prime Number Euclid proved in the 3rd century BC that there are an infinite number of prime numbers. A prime number can be divided only by itself and the number 1. Primes serve as the building blocks for all positive integers, and have applications in cryptography and other fields. Mersenne numbers are numbers that are one less than a power of two (2n – 1). A Mersenne number that is also a prime number is called a Mersenne prime. These can be found and verified relatively quickly. Before 1952, 12 Mersenne primes were known; with the aid of computers, 30 more have been found. The eight largest have all been found by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a distributed network of volunteers using their spare computer power to find the largest Mersenne primes. The largest currently known prime, 232,582,657– 1, was found by Dr. Curtis Cooper and Dr. Steven Boone of Central Missouri State University on Sept. 4, 2006. It has 9,808,358 digits. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is offering a $100,000 award to whomever is the first to find a prime number with at least ten million digits; it seems likely that this will be claimed within the next few years. See also Prime Numbers and Numbers.
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