On December 15, 2005, a computing effort of the Central Missouri State University (CMSU), led by Curtis Cooper and Steven Boone, as part of the distributed computing project known as the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), discovered the largest known prime number, divisible only by the number 1 and itself: 2-1. 
The discovery, which marks the 43rd known Mersenne prime and the 9th discovered by GIMPS, was made by running a free downloadable program called Prime95. The CMSU team is currently the highest-ranked contributor to GIMPS with over 700 computers running Prime95.


This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable.
Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.
Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.
Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.
Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.
Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.
Distributed computing discovers largest known prime number