On December 15, 2005, Dr. Curtis Cooper and Dr. Steven Boone, professors at Central Missouri State University, discovered the 43rd Mersenne Prime, 2^30,402,457-1. The discovery is the largest known prime number.
significance of prime numbers is mainly in the encryption decryption algorithm space, the larger prime number is used as a seed in the algorithm to encrypt something, the harder it is to decrypt without knowing a very specific key, and correspondingly, the larger/longer the key is to decrypt it. Vo!
