Largest Prime Number

If it takes 700 computers nine years to find the answer, it must be one breast of a question. But for researchers in Missouri, on a quest to find the world’s largest prime number, it was all worthwhile.

 In mid – December , a reassuring beep signaled the end of the long search , and one of the computers came up with a prime number with mysterious name of M30402457 .

Made up of 9.1 million digits, it trounces all others discovered so far.

Prime numbers are positive numbers divisible only by themselves and the number one , such as 1,2, 3,5 and 7 .

The number discovered in Missouri falls into a special category called mersenne prime numbers.

These are expressed as the number 2 raised to the power of  “p” minus one, where p is also a prime number