New Prime Number Discovered

Big news in the math world!

Mathematicians at UCLA have discovered a new prime number, and it has over 13 million digits! It took a network of 75 computers to crank this number out. Prime numbers include numbers such as 2, 3, 7 and 29 that are divisible by only two whole positive numbers: themselves and the number one.

The newly discovered prime number is a special type known as a Mersenne prime number, named after Marin Mersenne, a 17th-century French mathematician. Mersenne prime numbers can be expressed as 2P-1, or two to the power of "P" minus one. P is itself a prime number. For the new prime, P is 43,112,609.

Read all about it here:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26914730/?GT1=43001

One of our resident math experts, Dan Moriarty, reminds us of this related numerical fact: Every whole number can be factored into a product of prime numbers. To study factoring numbers into primes, check out this Gizmo: Finding Factors with Area Models