Kar Hoe's Blog - The world's biggest prime number

The world's biggest prime number

Monday, 01 September 2008

It is known to us that the bigger the number is, the less likely that it is a prime number , due to the fact that it could be a multiple of any other numbers. From 1-100, there are quite alot of prime numbers but from 1000-1100, there are lesser prime numbers.

There has been a challenge by GIMPS, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search to see which super computer could find the biggest prime number. The prize is USD100,000.

To be able to obtain such a big prime number, you need a computer with a very powerful processing power as well as a very good algorithm (the way calculations are done) to obtain the number fast and big.

Recently, a computer reported the world biggest prime number. Can you believe how big is the number?

The clue is this 9.8 million. Still can't figure it out? Well, 9.8 million is not the figure, but it's the number of digits that make up the prime numbers. Can you believe it, that for such a big number, it is actually not divisable by any other numbers?