A group of UCLA mathematicians were awarded with a US$100,000 prize by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) after they discovered the first verified Mersenne prime number with more than ten million digits. This Mersenne prime had 13 million digits.

Before this discovery, there have only been 45 known Mersenne primes, seven of which were discovered in UCLA. The new Mersenne prime marks the eighth.

A prime number is any number like 3, 5 and 7, which can only be perfectly divided by one and themselves. A Mersenne prime is a prime number that can be expressed in the form “2 raised to N, minus 1″. That is, multiply the number 2 to itself N times, then subtract 1 from the result.

For the new Mersenne prime, N = 43,112,609. The group used 75 computers networked together to find it.