The world’s largest known prime number, converted to RGB pixels. Dr. Curtis Cooper recently found a >17 million digit prime number, 2^57,885,161-1, setting a world record. These super-large primes are known as Mersenne primes, after the French mathematician who studied them centuries ago. The raw digits containing 0-9 were split to six-number chunks, and then converted into the RGB color scale by pbump on Flickr. Here it is much, much bigger. It’s almost a perfect representation of noise.
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The world’s largest known prime number, converted to RGB pixels. Dr. Curtis Cooper recently found a >17 million digit prime number, 2^57,885,161-1, setting a world record. These super-large primes are known as Mersenne primes, after the French mathematician who studied them centuries ago.

The raw digits containing 0-9 were split to six-number chunks, and then converted into the RGB color scale by pbump on Flickr. Here it is much, much bigger. It’s almost a perfect representation of noise.