Central Missouri professor Curtis Cooper discovers world's largest prime number, again
This screen grab shows just s small fraction of the digits in the newest Mersenne prime number discovered by University of Central Missouri professor Chris Cooper
Copyright 2013 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Posted: 02/06/2013
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By: 41 Action News Staff
WARRENSBURG, Mo. - A University of Central Missouri professor has made quite a find.
Curtis Cooper is a volunteer with Great Internet Marsenne Prime Search (GIMPS). For the third time in his career, Cooper and UCM have discovered the largest known prime number.
The number is 2 to the 57,885,161st power, minus one. It has 17,425,170 digits.
The new number, a bit too long to include in this story, is a member of a special class of extremely rare prime numbers known as Mersenne primes, , which all take the form 2 to the xth power, minus 1. There are now only 48 known Mersenne primes.
If you were to read the newest number, at a modest average of 3 digits per second, it would take you just over 67 days.
For more information on Cooper's discovery, visit http://bit.ly/XVQXLP.
To see the entire number, visit http://bit.ly/XVR7m8 (link may take a while to download).
Editor's Note: A previously-published version of this story incorrectly identified the University of Central Missouri professor as Chris Cooper.
Copyright 2013 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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