A team of mathematicians from UCLA managed to find, after intense work, a 13 million-digit prime number, looking to complete the challenge presented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The EFF announced a $100,000 prize for the discovery of the first Mersenne prime with more than 10 million digits, in an effort to promote cooperative computing on the Web. Landon Noll of Cisco Systems Inc., one of the judges for the EFF, explained that the award is just an incentive to stretch the computational ability of the Internet and that there are also two other prizes still available: a $150,000 award for a prime with 100 million digits, and a $250,000 award for one with a billion digits, both extremely difficult to identify.

The discovery was made using a network of 75 computers with Windows XP. "We're delighted," said UCLA's Edson Smith, the leader of the effort, as quoted by the Associated Press. "Now we're looking for the next one, despite the odds."

Prime numbers, such as seven or eleven, are only divisible by themselves and one. Mersenne primes, which are named after 17th century French mathematician Marin Mersenne, are expressed with the formula 2P-1, where P is also a prime number.

The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS, managed to attract thousands of people, all of them excited about performing these calculations. So far, only 46 Mersenne primes have been identified, with GIMPS holding 12 of them.

George Woltman, founder of GIMPS, explained that there is no clear use for the discovery. Still, “you never know where discoveries may lead you,” he added. “But really, it’s like climbing Mt. Everest. You do it because it’s there. It’s a lot safer, though. You can do it from the air-conditioned comfort of your home.”