Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.For many people, prime numbers have faded into the background since distant grade school days. However, for Luke Durant, a 36-year-old former Nvidia programmer, prime numbers became an all-consuming passion. He devoted nearly one year and invested a considerable sum of his own money to uncover the world’s largest known prime number.If you need a refresher, a prime number is a whole number that can only be divided by 1 and itself, such as 2, 3, 5 and 7. Durant’s remarkable discovery, officially called M136279841, consists of an astounding 41,024,320 digits and marks the first prime breakthrough in almost six years.The historic finding is classified as a Mersenne prime, which is named after the French monk Marin Mersenne, who studied these numbers more than 350 years ago. Mersenne primes are a rare kind of number, making Durant’s finding of the 52nd known Mersenne prime even more impressive. A number is only considered a Mersenne prime if it can be written in the form 2ᵖ-1.Unlike other large prime numbers used in some applications to protect internet security, Mersenne primes are important for other reasons. “The historical record of the world’s largest prime tells us something about the historical capability of computers, and in particular it tells us something about the progress of humanity …
