Marketplace®

Daily business news and economic stories

Largest prime number: Still just a slice of pi

A discovery of a lifetime (at least for the math geeks among us): the largest prime number in the world.

A mathematician has discovered the largest prime number known to man. It’s got 17 million digits. And the lucky discoverer? Dr. Curtis Cooper, a professor of math and computer science at the University of Central Missouri.

He admits: “there’s really no practical application” for his discovery. But he compares the search to an art form and says “in a lot of ways, mathematics and art are pretty closely related.”

Due to the length of the number, he hasn’t read all the digits. But he does say the first digit is a 5 and the last digit is a 1. See the full number here (warning: the page may take a while to load).

Related Topics

Tagged as:

Latest Episodes

View All Shows
  • Marketplace
    7 hours ago
    25:19
  • Make Me Smart
    13 hours ago
    19:00
  • Marketplace Morning Report
    15 hours ago
    6:55
  • Marketplace Tech
    20 hours ago
    8:33
  • This Is Uncomfortable
    3 days ago
    56:05
  • Million Bazillion
    24 days ago
    32:45