A basic feature of number theory, prime numbers are also a fundamental building block of computer science, from hashtables to cryptography.

A collaborative computer project has discovered the largest known prime number. The new prime number is nearly one million digits larger than the previous record prime number, in a special class ...

A new prime number has been discovered that is more than 16 million digits larger than the largest prime number ever found. The number is 2^136279841-1, which is 41,024,320 decimal digits and ...

In 2017, however, a developer named Mihai Preda designed an open-source program called GpuOwl to continue the Mersenne prime research through these muc-improved machines.