It’s the 49th prime number discovered since the search began in about 500 BCE. The GIMPS project, located at the University of Central Missouri, beat out the previous record holder, discovered in 2013, by a cool 5 million digits.
Hilariously, the number was discovered using nothing more than an Intel Core i7 processor. Given that it would take you about 127 days to pronounce it's been nicknamed M74207281.
only the 49th? It would seem like there should be more.
Right? I thought there would be more as well.
I wonder if there are more below this that have been missed. If I were simply looking for big prime numbers I would focus on the 2^n-1 and 2^n-3 series (3, 7, 31, 127, all are 2^n-1, and 5, 13, 29, 61 are 2^n-3… but 11, 17, 19, 23, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, etc. are prime and don't fit this… 2 is a special case).