JOE PALCA, host: We have a bit of news from the number world today. A new Mersenne prime has been discovered. What's that, you say? Well, a Mersenne prime is a special kind of prime.</s>JOE PALCA, host: You remember what primes are - numbers that are only divisible by one and themselves. So, two, five, seven, et cetera, 13. A Mersenne prime has the mathematical formula two to the Nth power minus one, where N is prime. And the resulting number is prime.</s>JOE PALCA, host: And since they were first described by ancient Greek mathematicians, there have only been a grand total of 46 Mersenne primes uncovered. And the largest of them is nearly 13 million digits long.</s>JOE PALCA, host: Well, now, according to George Woltman, the head of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, there is a 47th prime. It's just a little bit smaller than the largest, and it was found by someone in Norway using a 3.0 GHz Intel Core processor. So, you heard it here first. Pretty cool, huh?
A computing project on the Internet called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search has discovered a new Mersenne prime number, only the 47th since ancient Greek mathematicians first uncovered them.