The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) team recently broke its four-year dry spell in prime-number search, by revealing in a recent announcement that they have found the biggest prime number which contains over 17 million digits --- 17,425,170 digits to be precise!

With the GIMPS efforts chiefly involving the use of a computer program which is used worldwide by PC networks to collectively look for a special type of prime number, called a Mersenne prime, the new 17,425,170-gigit prime number was found by Curtis Cooper from the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg.

With a Mersenne prime number being a prime number which can be written in scientific shorthand 2p - 1, where the exponent is itself a prime, the new number found by Cooper is only the 48th Mersenne prime number - and also the biggest one - found thus far.

Specifically speaking, the new prime number - the first one to be found in four years - is `2 multiplied by itself 57,885,161 times'; and mathematically written as 257,885,161-1. An abbreviated version of the new prime number can now either be seen, or all its 17,425,170 digits downloaded, in a massive 22MB text file.

Pointing out that finding a new prime number is "sort of like finding a diamond," Martin's University of Tennessee's Chris Caldwell - who keeps a record of the biggest known prime numbers - said: "For some reason people decide they like diamonds and so they have a value. People like these large primes and so they also have a value."