Luke Durant, a researcher and amateur mathematician, has identified the largest new prime number known to humankind. The newly discovered prime number is 2 to the power of 136,279,841, then minus one.

Image made with elements from Canva. Let’s go back to grade school—do you remember learning about prime numbers? They’re numbers that can only be divided by themselves and one. So 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and ...

A prime number is a natural number greater than 1 that has exactly two distinct factors, 1 and the number itself. So, if p is a prime number then its only factors will be 1 and p itself. 4: It can be ...