KANSAS CITY: After running 1,000 computers non-stop for 39 days to uncover the world’s largest prime number yet, a Missouri college professor said this week he is starting all over to top his own record. “It’s a never-ending job,” said Curtis Cooper, a computer science professor at the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg. The computers are still running, although finding a higher prime number is estimated to take five to seven more years. Thousands of other computers in the United States are making the same search. “This is my first love,” Cooper, 60, said in an interview with Reuters. “It’s pure mathematics. It’s kind of an art form.” Cooper said he has received calls and e-mails from around the world after Wednesday’s announcement that he had identified the prime number — which is a number that can only be divided by itself and 1. For example, 4 is not a prime number because it can be divided by itself, 1 and 2. Prime numbers include 2, 3, 5, 7 and on up to the giant figure Cooper and his computers discovered, which has 17,425,170 digits. The new number is 2 multiplied by itself 57,885,161 times, minus 1. A single campus computer, labeled #22, found the number on Jan. 25, but it had to be verified by the prime number locator project known as GIMPS — the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search.
Longest prime number with 17,425,170 digits found
