John Voight receives funding from the Simons Foundation and is affiliated with the Number Theory Foundation. Imagine a number made up of a vast string of ones: 1111111…111. Specifically, 136,279,841 ...
Image made with elements from Canva. Let’s go back to grade school—do you remember learning about prime numbers? They’re numbers that can only be divided by themselves and one. So 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and ...
Luke Durant, a researcher and amateur mathematician, has identified the largest new prime number known to humankind. The newly discovered prime number is 2 to the power of 136,279,841, then minus one.