What's New

The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search ( GIMPS ) has found the 46^th larger Mersenne prime in August 2008.

This number belongs to a special class of rare prime numbers called " Mersenne primes" and is named after Marin Mersenne, a 17th century mathematician and music theorist who first studied these numbers over 350 years ago.

The formula for this new prime number is 2^43,112,609-1. Written out, the number has more than 10 million digits. To help visualize the size of the 46^th known Mersenne prime, it would require 3,461 pages to display the number in base 10 with 75 digits per line and 50 lines per page.

On April 12^th 2009, the 47^th known Mersenne prime, 2^42,643,801-1, a 12,837,064 digit number was found by Odd Magnar Strindmo from Melhus in Norway! This prime is the second largest known prime number, a "mere" 141,125 digits smaller than the Mersenne prime found last August.

As of 2023, the 51 known Mersenne primes are 2^p − 1 for the following p:

2, 3, 5, 7, 13, 17, 19, 31, 61, 89, 107, 127, 521, 607, 1279, 2203, 2281, 3217, 4253, 4423, 9689, 9941, 11213, 19937, 21701, 23209, 44497, 86243, 110503, 132049, 216091, 756839, 859433, 1257787, 1398269, 2976221, 3021377, 6972593, 13466917, 20996011, 24036583, 25964951, 30402457, 32582657, 37156667, 42643801, 43112609, 57885161, 74207281, 77232917, 82589933.