The world's largest known prime number has been discovered, but we can't show it because it's so large it would take up 21 standard-sized novels to turn into text. Called M136279841, it comes to ...

A prime number is a whole number that can only be divided by 1 and itself. A former Nvidia programmer discovered the world's largest known prime number using graphics processing units.

With the help of just a few thousand graphics cards spread across 17 countries' datacenters and some free software, Durant discovered the world's largest known prime number: 2 136,279,841-1.