Largest Known Prime Number Discovered

[tomarin]

Here is the link. I didn’t know that people were still looking for ‘new’ prime numbers.

 

[Joe_5859]

Very cool. I was always decent at math, though I never studied it in college. But I’ve had a lot of “math nerd” friends over the years. So this stuff does fascinate me. It’s hard to believe that a number could be that large and yet only be divisible by one and itself.

 

[tomarin]

Yes. Does the ‘space’ between the prime numbers get larger and larger so that the next not-yet-discovered prime number would be much larger than this one, do you think?

 

[Maximilian75]

They’re very useful in encryption… here’s a video about it

 

[tomarin]

Ooh, thanks. Character limit.

 

[RandomAlias]

Does the ‘space’ between the prime numbers get larger and larger so that the next not-yet-discovered prime number would be much larger than this one, do you think?

Not necessarily. Prime numbers do become sparser within higher ranges of integers, but the distribution is uneven. No matter how high you go, there can still be close pairs of primes. This article summarizes recent research about that: Twin Prime Conjecture (from Encyclopedia Britannica).