The discovery of the world's largest prime number was announced this week with 41 million digits. It surpassed the previous record by a margin of 16 million digits. This number is 282,589,933-1 or with the shorter nickname M136279841. It is the result of multiplying the number two 136,279,841 times which is then subtracted by 1.
In addition to being the largest prime number ever discovered, M136279841 is also the largest Mersenne prime number ever discovered. A Mersenne prime number is a prime number obtained by multiplying the number 2 before subtracting it by one.
M136279841 was discovered by Luke Durant, a researcher involved with the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) on October 11. Durant uses a network of cloud supercomputers powered by thousands of NVIDIA A100 chips located in 17 countries. The discovery was later confirmed by another supercomputer with an NVIDIA H100 chip. For successfully finding the largest prime number, Durant received a prize of $3000 (~RM 13,000).