Mathematicians at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have recently discovered the much sought after largest prime number known so far, a whopping 13 million digits Mersenne prime. The finding could win the UCLA group $100,000, a prize offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation that is aimed at promoting cooperative computing on the Internet.

The team of scholars used a network of 75 computers, all running on the Windows XP operating system, to find the prime, which was afterwards verified by a system that worked with a different algorithm.

The number is the eight Mersenne prime discovered at UCLA, leader of the group Edson Smith stating that they would begin the search for a higher one.

Mersenne primes are prime numbers expressed as two to the power of P minus one, where P itself is also a prime number. They are named after Marin Mersenne, a seventeenth century French scholar who is best remembered for his list of 2P-1 prime numbers, although he was also a theologian, philosopher and music theorist referred to as the “father of acoustics.”

The 13 million digit Mersenne prime is the 46th one of its kind discovered up to now, the one before it having been found on August 23 this year.

All of the numbers have been discovered by a cooperative system on the Web, called the „Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search” (GIMPS).

For this latest prime, the exponent P has been reported as being 43,112,609.

Prime numbers are positive integral numbers which are only divisible by themselves and one.

Since the year 1951, all prime numbers have been found by computers.