The largest known prime number is now 7,816,230 digits long, thanks to a distributed-computing project that recruits idle PC’s for some serious number crunching. The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search—named for a 17th-century monk who published a list of prime numbers and a method for finding new ones—has now turned up eight new prime numbers in almost a decade of work. The newest known prime number, verified by the computer of a German eye surgeon, can be rendered (rather cumbersomely) in scientific notation as 225,964,951-1.
But some mathematics experts say a new prime is no big deal: They’re more interested in trying to determine if the list of prime numbers is, as many people suspect, infinite.
