As of October 2024, we have found the biggest prime number we know of — and it took almost 6 years to find it. To generate this number, you multiply 2 by itself 136,279,841 times (resulting in an ...

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. For many people ...

Called M136279841, the value belongs to a rare class of prime numbers called Mersenne primes and was found using a supercomputer system spread across 17 countries ...