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Martin NowakA German eye doctor and amateur mathematician, Dr. Martin Nowack of Michelfeld, Germany discovered the world's largest prime number after a 50-day search using his personal computer. The number was discovered on February 18, 2005. Dr Nowak's prime number has 7,816,230 digits and is written as 2 to the 25,964,951st power minus 1. The number belongs to a special class of rare prime numbers known as Mersenne primes, named after a 17th century French monk Marin Mersenne who first studied them 350 years ago. So far only 42 have been found. Dr Nowak is one of thousands of volunteers using software provided by the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a project to discover the holy grail of prime number research - a 10m-digit prime number. It took experts five days to work out that Dr Nowak's new number was bigger than the previous biggest prime, discovered last May by an American. External links Nowack, Martin
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