Amateur Mathematician Discovers Largest Known Prime Number, Soooo What's A Prime Number Again?

Guys, we now have a new leader in the clubhouse for the world's biggest prime number and it's all thanks to an amateur mathematician who now has a great opening line with the ladies… nerdy ladies. 

However, this find has led to one major question among those of us who eked our way through the one college math course they needed to graduate with a C: what the hell is a prime number?

According to Live Science, big-time math guy Luke Durant was playing around with a tool called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS (good luck googling "Gimps" and coming up with math stuff, by the way). It's a free program and Durant used it as well as the power of thousands of graphics processing units, or GPUs, across 24 data centers in 17 countries to find the biggest prime number ever discovered.

That's too many numbers for me… I think I need to go lay down. (Getty Images)

It's known as 2^136,279,841 – 1 and has 41 million digits, but again, for those of us who were far and away the dumbest ones in our high school calculus class, what is a prime number?

Well, a prime number is any number that can only be evenly divided by itself and 1.

Numbers like 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11 are some of the lower examples. Ones that you don't need some fancy GIMPS machine figuring out for you.

I'll be the first to tell you I'm not a math guy, but there's no doubt that this is a major discovery. However, I do wonder how well this will translate to normal people who aren't math whizzes (*raises hand*).

I think it would fly over the vast majority of people's heads. If you told someone this at a bar, the odds are they'd have no idea what you were talking about or they'd politely excuse themselves, and a few seconds later you'd hear tires squealing out of the parking lot.

Still, math people will get it, and I'm sure our guy Luke will get some free drinks set his way if he goes to some kind of math convention… if they have those.