“The number 2^^57,885,161 – 1 has picked up the baton as the largest known prime number, a result that is tremendously exciting for mathematicians, if rather irrelevant to the rest of mathematics.”  Found via Boing Boing. I am surprised that it has been about 4 years since GIMPS found the last Mersenne prime number.  I used to have a computer running GIMPS, but I think it overheated my processor, so I stopped the program.  Maybe there is a way to limit the program’s use of the processor.