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.

Amateur number detective Luke Durant (a researcher and former employee of the software company NVIDIA) recently found the biggest prime ever discovered: 2 136,279,841 -1, now also known as M136279841.

It’s been nearly six years since math devotees discovered the last largest known prime number, but the bar has officially been raised by over 16 million digits. On October 21, the Great Internet ...

Now, Luke Durant, a 36-year-old researcher and former employee of tech giant NVIDIA, has discovered the 52nd Mersenne prime, which also happens to be the largest prime number known to ...

A prime number is a whole number that can only be divided by 1 and itself. A former Nvidia programmer discovered the world's largest known prime number using graphics processing units.