On Feb. 19 the new largest prime number, the Mersenne Prime Number, was discovered. It is 2 to the 25, 964,951st power, minus 1. It is 7,816,230 digis long and would completely fill up 58 issues of Science News.
I don't know about anyone else but this fact humbles me. While I go about my daily business of trying to stay afloat in a complex world, one or more people have figured this out using software they downloaded from www.mersenne.org.
Now I can understand how Mersenne, a 17th century monk had time to figure stuff like that out, but I just don't know where I would fit that in.
Kudos to everyone connected with the project!
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