New giant prime! New giant prime!
(It’s still really hard for me not to automatically capitalize “prime” after NaNo.)

Curtis Cooper at the University of Central Missouri came across the prime as part of the GIMPS computing project.

GIMPS, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, is a distributed project designed to hunt for the rare Mersenne Primes, of which there have only been 47 found. Mersenne primes have the special form of 2p – 1, where p is itself a prime number.

The new colossal number has been confirmed as the 48th instance of a Mersenne Prime, which makes it super special. To prove the primality of the incredibly huge number, one of Cooper’s computers ran for 39 straight days. Other researchers then had to verify the primality.

I can’t wait to see the spazzing everyone falls into when we find the next DOUBLE Mersenne Prime. There are only four of them thus far discovered, you know.

COOL HUH?