Largest Prime Number M77232917 discovered on January 4 , 2018
A FedEx employee Jonathan Pace ,an engineer by profession has discovered the largest prime Number. According to GIMPS’s (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) website, the newly discovered prime number is calculated by raising 2 to the 77,232,917th power and subtracting 1.
M77232917 itself is reportedly 23 million digits long. According to New Scientist, it is one million digits longer than its predecessor, which clocked in at 22 million digits.
The greatest prime number discovered before M77232917 was found in 2015, and was 5 million digits longer than the one that came before it in 2013.
Although Euclid proved that if 2^P-1 is prime, then 2^P-1*(2^P-1) is a perfect number in 350 BC, the French monk Marin Mersenne was honored with the name for his conjecture of which prime numbers could be used for P to produce larger primes. Although written in the early 17th Century, the conjecture took 300 years to prove. Meanwhile, Euler also got in on the act, proving that all even perfect numbers are formed this way.
In mathematics, a Mersenne prime is a prime number that is one less than a power of two. That is, it is a prime number of the form of 2^p − 1 for some integer p.
