Durant's discovery overturned the former record holder, which sat uncontested for nearly six years, an unprecedentedly long reign in the modern search for ever larger prime numbers.
The new prime contains a mind-boggling 41,024,320 digits, which is far beyond human intelligibility and offers a significant milestone in the pursuit of prime discoveries.
Primes play a major role in pure math, where they're main characters in a field called number theory, and in practice, where they underlie widely used encryption algorithms.
As primes grow, they spread further apart, making each new find harder than the last, contributing to the extended gap between major discoveries of large primes.
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