World's largest number found

Largest prime-number found. Michael Shafer a chemical engineering student at Michigan State University found out the largest known prime number which is 6,320,430 digits long. Well - he wasn't alone: a distributed network of more than 200,000 computers and two years was involved too.

The new number is a Mersenne prime, especially rare type of prime, that take the form 2 ^p-1, where p is also a prime number. The new number can be represented as 2^20,996,011-1. And this one is the 40th Mersenne-prime found.