Why do we need to know about prime numbers with millions of digits?
January 12, 2018 by Ittay Weiss, The Conversation
Prime numbers are more than just numbers that can only be divided by themselves and one. They are a mathematical mystery, the secrets of which mathematicians have been trying to uncover ever since Euclid proved that they have no end.
An ongoing project – the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search – which aims to discover more and more primes of a particularly rare kind, has recently resulted in the discovery of the largest prime number known to date. Stretching to 23,249,425 digits, it is so large that it would easily fill 9,000 book pages. By comparison, the number of atoms in the entire observable universe is estimated to have no more than 100 digits.
Read more at:
https://phys.org/news/2018-01-prime-millions-digits.html#jCp