A 26-year-old student at Michigan State University has made history by discovering the largest prime number in history. He was one of more than 60,000 volunteers who offered spare cpu time to the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS).

"The new number is 6,320,430 digits long. It took just over two years to find using a distributed network of more than 200,000 computers. Prime numbers are positive integers that can only be divided by themselves and one. Mersenne primes are an especially rare type of prime that take the form 2 ^p-1, where p is also a prime number. The new number can be represented as 2^20,996,011-1. It is only the 40^th Mersenne prime to have ever been found."