Largest known prime number

It was found on October 12, 2024, on a cloud-based virtual machine volunteered by Luke Durant, a 36-year-old researcher from San Jose, California, to the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS).

[6] Finding larger prime numbers is sometimes presented as a means to stronger encryption, but this is not the case.

[11] In 2008, a ten-million-digit prime won a US$100,000 prize and a Cooperative Computing Award from the EFF.

[10] GIMPS also offers a US$3,000 research discovery award for participants who discover a new Mersenne prime of less than 100 million digits.

[13] The following table lists the progression of the largest known prime number in ascending order.

[citation needed] GIMPS volunteers found the sixteen latest records, all of them Mersenne primes.

A plot of the number of digits in the largest known prime by year, since the electronic computer. The vertical scale is logarithmic .
Commemorative postmark used by the UIUC Math Department after proving that M 11213 is prime