MHB 2^(57885161) - 1 is now the largest known prime number.

[Chris L T521]

I noticed there was no mathematics news subforum, so this was the next best place to put this even though math related topics aren't really discussed in the chat room.

As of January 25th, 2013, $2^{57885161}-1$ is the largest known Mersenne prime and is an impressive 17,425,170 digits long. It's the first Mersenne prime discovered in about 4 years ($2^{42643801}-1$ was the last Mersenne prime discovered [April 2009]).

You can read more about the Mersenne primes here. They've even made available a text file containing all 17,425,170 digits of the latest Mersenne prime for downloading (but it's 22MB in size...I wonder why...).

 

[Wrichik Basu]

Currently, it is $2^{82,589,933} - 1.$ It has 24,862,048 digits and was found on December 7, 2018 and announced on December 21 of the same year.