World's Largest Prime Number Discovered by Hobby Mathematician

A 36-year-old Californian has uncovered a new prime number with over 41 million digits using a global network of computing power.

The newly discovered prime number has exactly 41,024,320 digits, surpassing the previous record by more than 16 million digits.
Luke Durant, a hobby mathematician from San José, California, utilized a cloud-based supercomputer network spanning 24 data center regions across 17 countries.
This number, termed M136279841, is a Mersenne prime, calculated by multiplying the number 2 by itself 136,279,841 times and subtracting 1.
The discovery was part of the collaborative Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) project, which has found 18 new prime numbers since its inception in 1996.
Prime numbers are crucial in cryptography and the understanding of natural phenomena, yet their distribution remains one of mathematics' great unsolved mysteries.