World’s largest prime numbers found
Scientists in the US and Germany have found the two largest prime numbers ever calculated in a discovery which could dramatically increase the effectiveness of cryptographic systems.
The two numbers were discovered within a fortnight of each other by Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), which has spent 12 years on the project.
The largest, 12,978,189 digits long, was discovered by a team from UCLA and the second, discovered on August 23rd, two weeks before a computer user in Germany found one 11,185,272 digits long. The search for large prime numbers, numbers which can only be divided by themselves or one, was sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) as part of an effort to build a near-unbreakable encryption system.
