Titanic Primes Raced to Win \$100,000 Research Award

Researchers have discovered the two largest known prime numbers, a whopping 12,978,189 and 11,185,272 digits long, as part of a 12 year old, world-wide volunteer computing project, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search ("GIMPS"). The primes can be written shorthand as $2^{43,112,609}-1$ and $2^{37,156,667}-1$. The larger number qualifies for a \$100,000 research award, most of which GIMPS will donate to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and to charity.

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