A megaprime is a prime number

Prime number

A prime number is a natural number greater than 1 that has no positive divisors other than 1 and itself. A natural number greater than 1 that is not a prime number is called a composite number. For example 5 is prime, as only 1 and 5 divide it, whereas 6 is composite, since it has the divisors 2...

 with at least one million decimal digits (whereas titanic prime

Titanic prime

Titanic prime is a term coined by Samuel Yates in the 1980s, denoting a prime number of at least 1000 decimal digits. Few such primes were known then, but the required size is trivial for modern computers.The first 30 titanic primes are of the form:...

 is a prime number with at least 1000 digits, and gigantic prime

Gigantic prime

A gigantic prime is a prime number with at least 10,000 decimal digits.The term appeared in Journal of Recreational Mathematics in the article "Collecting gigantic and titanic primes" by Samuel Yates...

 has at least 10000 digits).

, 35 megaprimes are known. The first to be found was the Mersenne prime

Mersenne prime

In mathematics, a Mersenne number, named after Marin Mersenne , is a positive integer that is one less than a power of two: M_p=2^p-1.\,...

 2^6972593−1 with 2,098,960 digits, discovered in 1999 by Nayan Hajratwala, a participant in the distributed computing

Distributed computing

Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal...

 project GIMPS.

The term bevaprime has also been proposed as a term for a prime with at least 1,000,000,000 digits.

See also

• Largest known prime number
• Electronic Frontier Foundation—Awards

External links

• Chris Caldwell, The Largest Known Primes Database at The Prime Pages.
• PrimeGrid’s 321 Prime Search, about the discovery of 3×2^6090515−1.