47th Mersenne prime has been found

It has just been confirmed that the 47^th Mersenne prime has been found. Since Mersenne primes are factors of even perfect numbers, this means we have a new perfect number.

This is the newest, but not the largest--one found last August is bigger. However, this is still very big: the Mersenne prime, which is 2^42,643,801-1 is a 12,837,064 digit number and the perfect number has twice as many digits.

It was actually found in April but it took two months to get the confirmation.

Here is the story (and related links)

http://www.mersenne.org/

thanks to Prof. Lawrence Shirley