Here at Chalkdust we’re very excited by the latest discovery of the new largest prime number, which is the Mersenne prime $2^{74,207,281}-1$. So to celebrate this discovery by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, we thought we’d publish the number.

Fun facts first:

• All Mersenne primes are of the form $2^p – 1$, where $p$ is prime (the first four are 3, 7, 31, and 127).
• Mersenne primes are named after Marin Mersenne (whose face is in the banner at the top!).
• In binary, the number is ‘1’ repeated 74,207,280 times!
• This means it requires 8.85MB of disk space to store, or 7 floppy disks!
• Using the “million, billion, trillion” naming system, you could call this number 300 septillisensquadragintaquadringentiilliquattuorducentillion!

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