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How Can We Find the Largest Known Prime Number?

💡 The Answer

  • The largest known primes are almost always Mersenne primes, of the form 2^p−1.
  • The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) coordinates volunteer computing.
  • As of 2025, the largest known prime has over 24 million digits.
  • Finding a new Mersenne prime can take years of distributed computation.

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