What’s the point to searching for the largest prime number?

Question

What’s the point to searching for the largest prime number?

In: 12

Answer 1

Large prime numbers are used in encryption algorithms. Multiplying two primes together is easy, but factoring a prime is hard. It’s this difficulty of factoring primes that make encryption hard to break. The bigger the starting primes, the better.

Besides cryptography, we search for new primes simply because we can. We humans often like to do stuff that’s hard for its own sake, even if it doesn’t have an obvious use case.