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...