The largest known prime number discovered. That’s why it’s important

He broke a record that had stood for over six years, managing to calculate the largest prime number never discovered until today: we owe Luke Durant, a former Nvidia employee, the feat of …

The largest known prime number discovered. That's why it's important


He broke a record that had stood for over six years, managing to calculate the largest prime number never discovered until today: we owe Luke Durant, a former Nvidia employee, the feat of having found “(2^136,279,841)-1” (whose official designation is “M136279841”), a number made up of 41 million digits.

The former software engineer, who is not specifically a researcher, decided last year to take part in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (Gimps), a global computing project that takes advantage of the participation of numerous collaborators from all over the world. with the aim of searching for the largest prime numbers. By exploiting the boundless computing possibilities of thousands of processors distributed in 24 data centers and in 17 different countries, Durant managed to accomplish an extraordinary feat, identifying a number composed of 41 million digits which, to be clear, takes up as much as 40 megabytes in a simple text file.

To understand what it is about in simple words, prime numbers are positive integers greater than one and divisible only by themselves and by one: they are therefore, essentially, fundamental elements and basic of calculation of algebra, geometry and applied mathematics, to which numerous theorems, corollaries and hypotheses are closely connected. The first research in this sense dates back to the ancient Greeks, specifically to Euclid’s “Elements”, written around 300 BC

It is clear that today, thanks to the computing power of new computers, without considering the even superior possibilities of quantum ones, it is possible to aim ever higher towards figures that were once not even imaginable. An interesting category is that of “Mersenne numbers“, which are expressed in the formula 2n – 1, and it is precisely to them that the Gimps project, whose father is George Woltman, is dedicated: born in 1996, this collaboration has allowed man to discover 16 large prime numbers. everyone can contribute to the project by simply downloading and installing software created specifically for the calculation: to incentivize researchers, the authors of the discoveries are paid a cash prize.

Although it may seem strange, this kind of discoveries also has implications in our daily lives, for example in the field of encryption.

And this is because the greater the quantity of complex prime numbers, the more difficult it is for cybercriminals to decrypt, just to mention one example, the protections placed on our credit/debit cards or emails (pins and passwords). The Rsa algorithm used to protect our sensitive data uses keys based on prime numbers: the larger and more complex they are, the greater the decryption difficulties.