Pace, a 51-year old electrical engineer based in Germantown, Tennessee, has been hunting primes for over fourteen years and his belated Christmas present is eligible for a $3,000 reward from GIMPS. You don’t expect to find two so close to one another.”



The new prime number was originally found on Boxing Day by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (Gimps) collaboration which harnesses the number-crunching power of volunteers’ computers all over the world. The newly discovered number has exactly 23,249,425 digits and is called M77232917, since it also belongs to a rare class of prime numbers called Mersenne primes. The new addition to the Mersenne primes is the 50th number of its kind to have been found, and it beat the previous largest known prime number, also a Mersenne prime, by 910,807 digits. The number belongs to a rare group of so-called Mersenne prime numbers, named after the 17th century French monk Marin Mersenne. Volunteers have a chance to earn research discovery awards of $3,000 or $50,000 if their computer discovers a new Mersenne prime. If you would like to have a chance of winning another such award in the future, you can volunteer with GIMPS by installing its free software on your computer and running it in the hope of finding the next Mersenne prime.
The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search announces the discovery of the latest largest known prime number, a Mersenne prime with 23,249,425 digits equal to 277,232,917 − 1.