New Largest Prime Number Discovered.

The end of the year 2005 is approaching and with it another Largest Prime Number has been announced. Sharon Gaudin of Datamation on December 28 announced the discovery. "The number, which is expressed as 2 to the 30,402,457th power minus 1, is a 9.1 million-digit figure. It was discovered by a team of researchers at Central Missouri State University." This is also the largest Mersenne prime number ever found. A Mersenne prime number is characterized for having as the exponent of 2 a prime number (in this case 30,402,457).