Man spent 2 million to find new largest prime number

It's been nearly six years since math devotees discovered the last largest known prime number, but the bar has officially been raised by over 16 million digits. On October 21, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a global community project dedicated to finding these incomprehensibly huge numbers, confirmed the 52nd Mersenne prime number is (drumroll, please) 2136279841-1. To translate, that's equivalent to multiplying the number 2 together 136,279,841 times, then subtracting 1. The latest mathematical figure stretches to include 41,024,320 digits--a number so gargantuan that the .txt Formed in 1999, GIMPS relies on an international network of volunteers who download specialized software that harnesses their computers' unused programming capabilities to search for exceptionally large Mersenne prime numbers.