It is a quite extraordinary figure. Dr Curtis Cooper from the University of Central Missouri has found the largest-known prime number – written (2 74207281 )-1. It is around 22m digits long and, if printed in full, would take you days to read. Its discovery comes thanks to a collaborative project of volunteers who use freely available software called GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search) to search for primes. A number which can only be divided by itself and 1 without a remainder is called a prime number . Here is a list of the primes less than 100: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97. Unlucky 13 Numbers appear everywhere in our lives – and good and bad superstitions have developed out of them. Remarkably, most of these superstitious numbers are prime. The superstition that 13 is unlucky results in some hotels and office buildings not having rooms or floors labelled 13 . And ...