Largest prime number found
"A team of researchers at Central Missouri State University has discovered the largest known prime number, university officials said Tuesday. "
...The team programmed 700 university computers to run the program years ago, Boone said. In mid-December, he said they found the world's largest prime number, known as M30402457. That's the same as 2 to the 30,402,457th power minus one, a number that is 9.1 million digits long.
"We're super excited," said Boone, a chemistry professor. "We've been looking for such a number for a long time."
Cool. Now what?
Via Jaz (who looks like a muppet).