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It is the 52nd Mersenne prime to be found since they were first studied over 350 years ago. A spiral representing primes. Image credit: Bocskai Istvan/Shutterstock.com The largest prime number ever discovered has been found by an amateur mathematician using Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS). Prime numbers, as you likely learned in school, are numbers that can only be divided by one and themselves. There are an infinite number of them, with all numbers greater than 1 being either a prime number or a composite of primes. But having discovered a whole lot of them, new primes are now...

The 22 million digit number and the amazing maths behind primes January 21, 2016 by Steve Humble, The Conversation Primes: here be magic. Credit: Shutterstock It is a quite extraordinary figure. Dr Curtis Cooper from the University of Central Missouri has found the largest-known prime number - written (274207281)-1. It is around 22m digits long and, if printed in full, would take you days to read. Its discovery comes thanks to a collaborative project of volunteers who use freely available software called GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) to search for primes. A number which can only be divided by...