A quite long prime

Mathematicians at UCLA have verified now the largest known prime number, 13 million digits long!

It's a Mersenne prime, in the form 2^p − 1. This new prime is 2^43,112,609 − 1. (And no, you can't put it in your calculator and get an answer... )

Read the news story

This kind of prime hunting requires a network of computers running together to do the massive amounts of calculations.