Numbers usually stay in their lane. You count your change, you check your speed, and you move on. But then there’s Luke Durant, a 36-year-old researcher and former NVIDIA engineer who decided to spend a staggering $2 million of his own money to find a single number.
He found it.
On October 12, 2024, the world changed—at least for math nerds and cryptographers. Durant discovered M136279841, the 52nd known Mersenne prime. It’s a monster. With 41,024,320 digits, it’s more than 16 million digits longer than the previous record-holder. If you tried to read this number aloud at a normal pace, you wouldn't finish for years. It would fill roughly 15,000 to 20,000 A4 pages if you dared to print it.
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Honestly, it’s basically a digital skyscraper.
The Man Who Traded a Fortune for a Prime
Luke Durant isn't your typical amateur mathematician. He’s a guy who deeply understands how hardware works, having spent years at NVIDIA. While most people use GPUs to play Cyberpunk 2077 or train AI chatbots, Durant saw them as the ultimate "sifting" machines for the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS).
GIMPS has been around since 1996. For nearly three decades, it was a game won by personal computers. You’d leave your PC running overnight, hoping your CPU would stumble upon a mathematical miracle. Durant ended that era.
He didn't use a desktop. He built a global "cloud supercomputer."
By leveraging server-grade GPUs across 24 data center regions in 17 countries, Durant scaled up the search to a level never seen before. He was basically renting thousands of high-end graphics cards—specifically NVIDIA A100s and H100s—to do the heavy lifting. He joined GIMPS in October 2023, and just a year later, he struck gold.
It was an expensive bet. $2 million isn't pocket change. But for Durant, it wasn't just about the number; it was about proving that GPUs are good for more than just generating AI art or mining crypto. They are fundamental tools for hard science and "big math."
What Exactly is a Mersenne Prime?
Most of us remember primes from grade school. They’re the "lonely" numbers like 2, 3, 5, and 7 that can only be divided by 1 and themselves.
Mersenne primes are a much rarer breed.
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Named after Marin Mersenne, a 17th-century French monk, these numbers follow a specific formula: $2^n - 1$. For M136279841, that "$n$" is the massive exponent 136,279,841. You multiply 2 by itself over 136 million times and then subtract 1.
Simple, right? Not even close.
Checking if a number that large is actually prime is a computational nightmare. It’s like searching for a specific grain of sand in a desert the size of Jupiter. Most numbers fail the test. In fact, in the entire history of human mathematics, we have only ever found 52 of these things.
The Dublin-Texas Connection
The discovery of M136279841 was a global relay race.
- October 11, 2024: An NVIDIA A100 GPU in Dublin, Ireland, flagged the number as a "probable prime" using the Fermat probable prime test.
- October 12, 2024: An NVIDIA H100 in San Antonio, Texas, ran the much more rigorous Lucas-Lehmer test and confirmed it was, indeed, the real deal.
This wasn't just a win for Durant. It was a win for Mihai Preda, who wrote the GpuOwl software that made GPU-based searching possible, and George Woltman, the founder of GIMPS.
Does This Number Actually Do Anything?
If you're looking for a practical use for a 41-million-digit number, you might be disappointed. Honestly, it has almost no utility in your daily life.
Standard encryption—the stuff that keeps your credit card safe when you buy shoes online—uses primes, but they are tiny compared to this. A 41-million-digit number is way too heavy to be efficient for banking.
As Woltman told the Washington Post, "It's entertainment for math nerds."
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But there’s a deeper point. Finding these primes tests hardware to its absolute limit. If a computer can crunch a prime for days without making a single error, that hardware is stable. It's the ultimate "stress test." Plus, Mersenne primes are tied to "perfect numbers"—numbers where the sum of their divisors equals the number itself (like 6 or 28). Every time we find a Mersenne prime, we find a new perfect number. It’s a piece of a puzzle we’ve been trying to solve since the ancient Greeks.
The Prize and the Payoff
For his $2 million investment and his world-record discovery, Luke Durant received a prize of... **$3,000**.
Yeah, the math doesn't exactly add up if you're looking for a return on investment. But Durant didn't do it for the cash. He’s already announced he is donating that $3,000 to the math department at the Alabama School of Math and Science (ASMS), his former high school.
He wanted to show what one person could do with the right expertise and the power of the cloud. He proved that the "age of the PC" in prime hunting is over, and the "age of the GPU" has arrived.
Actionable Next Steps
If this story has you itching to contribute to mathematical history, you don't need $2 million to start. You can actually join the search yourself:
- Download the GIMPS software: Visit Mersenne.org and download the free Prime95 software. It runs in the background of your computer.
- Run a Stress Test: Even if you don't care about primes, the GIMPS software is widely used by PC builders to test the stability of their CPUs and heat sinks.
- Explore the digits: If you have some time to kill, you can download the full text file of M136279841. Just be prepared for your text editor to potentially crash—it’s a lot of ones and zeros.
- Watch the experts: Check out the Numberphile YouTube channel, where Luke Durant and George Woltman explain the technical grit behind the discovery in much more detail.
The search for the 53rd Mersenne prime is already underway. The next big milestone is the first 100-million-digit prime, which comes with a $150,000 prize from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.