title: How can you handle absurdly large numbers?
body: <p>There are some scenarios where programmers need or want to find grossly large numbers.  These are often so large that they defy the programmer's comprehension.  I'm talking about things like <a href="http://primes.utm.edu/largest.html#largest" rel="nofollow">the largest known prime number</a> (with 12978189 <em>digits</em>) and the recently calculated <a href="http://www.numberworld.org/misc_runs/pi-10t/details.html" rel="nofollow">10 trillion digits of pi</a>.</p>
  
  <p>How can you create a program that handles these?  This far exceeds an integer, a long, a double, a BigInteger, a BigDecimal, or anything of the sort.  How do these kinds of programs for discovering these numbers get created?  How can you even store them in memory when no appropriate datatypes exist, and they would likely consume <em>gigabytes</em> of data each?</p>