On December 25, 2005 a new major development page was added in the Mathematical field. The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) project had discovered the 43rd known Mersenne prime. The new prime was the 43rd discovery in a special class of rare prime numbers known as Mersenne primes. It was named in the honor of French monk Marin Mersenne, who studied these, numbers more than 350 years ago. The new prime number is known as ‘M30402457’.
Drs.Curtis Cooper and Steven Boone, who were professors at Central Missouri State University, flagged the discovery of prime. This achievement also fueled researchers’ hopes around the globe and made them to win $100,000 prize cash money.
A Mersenne number is a positive integer in mathematics that is one less than a power of two i.e..
Mp = 2p – 1
These numbers define that the nth Mersenne number is simply a string of ‘n’ number of ‘1’s when it will represented in binary. For example, M8 = 28 – 1 = 255 = 11111113 is a Mersenne number.