Since 1998, I’ve been a participant in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, a project which aims to find huge prime numbers. Just a couple weeks ago, the project broke the world record for the ninth straight time. The record-setting number is 230,402,457-1, which weighs in at 9,152,052 digits! We’re getting awfully close to finding a ten million digit prime and winning the $100,000 prize offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

If you’d like to participate in the project as well, it’s very simple. Just download and install the GIMPS software, which you won’t even notice running in the background. And who knows, you just might get lucky and win a share of that huge prize!