If you're not keeping nerds entertained and having fun, it's going to slow down the entire nerd industry.

There's a new title holder for the largest known prime number.

Now, of course, there are an infinite number of primes. That's a proven thing. So this one, no matter how big, well, it's just a drop in the ocean.

This particular drop? Well, it has over 41 million digits. That's a pretty big drop. Can you

imagine that, a number so long that if I set at

one digit per second, 8, 8, 1, 6, 9, 4, etc, we'd be here for nearly a year and a half, and that's

without toilet breaks. Now, this particular number is in a very special category of primes called Mersenne Primes.

For over 30 years, the title holder for world's biggest prime has always been of this flavour.

To start things off, here's numberphiles' very own James Grime.

So Mersenne Prime is a prime number, of course, you know, famous prime numbers, building blocks of all of the numbers.

But the Mersen Primes is one of those special categories of primes.

In this case, a Mersenne Prime is one less than a power of two.

Here's another number file regular and prime enthusiast Matt Parker. I asked him where Mersen

Primes rank in the pantheon of primes. I would rank Mersenne primes very highly. Partly because they have such a long history.

The ancient Greeks cared about Mersen Primes. We care about Mersen Primes to have two millennia

of human effort trying to find these things. You kind of ignore that kind of historical

pedigree. Like that's, that's a, you know, a famous type of prime.

On top of that, they're just really nice. Like, being near a power to is just so pleasing.

And you're absolutely right. There's, you know, your Jermaine primes, your twin primes, all these

fun types of primes, sexy primes. But there's just something so pure

about Mersin primes. And that's only been aided by the fact that they are the easiest to find.

And so that has kept them so prominent for so long.

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