Chemical engineering graduate student Michael Shafer is living his 15 minutes of fame.

His name entered the record books on Nov. 17, for discovering the largest prime number known to man.

"After I found out, I did a short victory dance," Shafer said. "I'm glad no one was watching."

The number, written as 2 to the 20,996,011th power minus 1, is 6,320,430 digits long.

A prime number is a positive number only divisible by one and itself.

Shafer made the discovery by participating in a project called the "Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search."

The project connected 60,000 volunteers using more than 210,000 computers.

San Diego resident and server developer Scott Kurowski said the server connects participants from all over the world, turning the program into a supercomputer capable of performing 9 trillion calculations per second.

Shafer's computer, located in his research lab office at the Engineering Building, made the discovery after running continuously for 19 days.

For more on this story, see Thursday's edition of The State News.