KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Mathematicians at the University of Central Missouri have discovered a record-setting prime number that’s so large it would take about 6,000 pages of paper to print.
The 22.3-million-digit discovery is the 49th known Mersenne prime number and the fourth discovered at the university. Primes are numbers such as 3, 7 and 11 that are divisible only by themselves and 1 without leaving a remainder.