40th Known Mersenne Prime Found!!
On November 17, 2003 Michael Shafer's computer found the 40th known Mersenne prime, 220,996,011-1! This number "weighs in" at a whopping 6,320,430 decimal digits! This is also the largest known prime number, surpassing GIMPS' last discovery by over 2 million digits.
Mr. Shafer is a chemical engineering graduate student at Michigan State University.