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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