The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search confirmed a new largest known prime number, written as 2^136,279,841−1. The number contains 41,024,320 decimal digits and is more than 16 million digits longer than the previous record holder. It is the 52nd known member of the rare Mersenne-prime family.
Luke Durant, a 36-year-old researcher and former Nvidia employee from San Jose, California, made the find. An Nvidia A100 graphics processor in Dublin first reported the number as probably prime on October 11. The following day, an Nvidia H100 in San Antonio ran a Lucas-Lehmer test that confirmed primality, and GIMPS selected October 12 as the official discovery date.
Durant had joined the distributed computing project in October 2023. He built systems to run GIMPS software across thousands of cloud-server GPUs in 24 data-centre regions spanning 17 countries. The approach showed how processors widely associated with artificial intelligence can also perform the intensive arithmetic required for fundamental mathematical searches.
Mersenne primes take the form 2^p−1, where the exponent produces a prime result. The newly discovered number, also called M136279841, can be described as multiplying 136,279,841 copies of two and subtracting one. These primes are named after Marin Mersenne, the French monk who studied them more than 350 years ago.
The initial probable-prime result was not the end of verification. GIMPS arranged several independent Lucas-Lehmer tests using different programs and hardware. Prime95 ran on Intel processors, while PRPLL/GpuOwl was tested on AMD and Nvidia GPUs. Mlucas confirmed the result on an Intel CPU on October 19, and CUDALucas provided another Nvidia-based check. Contributors including Aaron Blosser, James Heinrich, Serge Batalov, Ken Kriesel, Mihai Preda and Durant participated in those confirmations.
Founded in 1996, GIMPS coordinates volunteers who use free software to examine candidates. It has found the last 18 known Mersenne primes. The 2024 result was the first GIMPS prime initially identified through a probable-prime test and ended a 28-year run in which ordinary personal computers produced the project's record discoveries.
Durant's find qualified for a $3,000 GIMPS research award, which he planned to donate to the Alabama School of Math and Science. The discovery did not imply that all smaller Mersenne candidates had been exhausted; GIMPS said smaller undiscovered examples may remain, while larger ones almost certainly await testing. Its importance lies both in extending the numerical record and in demonstrating a geographically distributed, GPU-based search and verification process. Official discovery credit went to Durant, Preda, George Woltman, Blosser and other contributors, reflecting both the initial computation and the independent checks that followed.
