[tyjkot]

Forgive my ignorance, but what is the purpose of finding prime numbers that are insanely large?

[envp]

Beyond a points its curiosity and pushing existing computational techniques to their limits. Sometimes it leads to new discoveries in computational techniques or in rarer cases new theoretical work.

Long story short, it’s fun to find out new things about weird numbers :)

[tyjkot]

Thank you for educating me on this.

[256_]

This question is addressed here:

https://www.mersenne.org/why_join/

[jebarker]

Because they're there