|
A googol is the large number 10100, that is, the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeros (in decimal representation). One way of grasping its size is that it is equivalent to multiplying the product of 1 million by 1 million 16 times, then further multiplying that by ten thousand. The term was coined in 1920 by nine-year-old Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. Kasner popularized the concept in his book Mathematics and the Imagination. A googol is of the same order of magnitude as the factorial of 70 (70! being approximately 1.198 googol, or 10 to the power 100.0784), and its only prime factors are 2 and 5 (100 of each). In binary it would take up 333 bits. The googol is of no particular significance in mathematics, but is useful when comparing with other incredibly large quantities such as the number of subatomic particles in the visible universe or the number of possible chess games. Kasner created it to illustrate the difference between an unimaginably large number and infinity, and in this role it is sometimes used in teaching mathematics. The Internet search engine Google was named after this number. The original founders were going for 'Googol', but ended up with 'Google' due to a spelling mistake on a cheque that investors wrote to the founders.
Writing out a googol A googol can be written in conventional notation as follows: 1 googol = 10100 = Its "conventional" English number name, on the short scale, is ten dotrigintillion, or on the long scale, ten thousand sexdecillion. The shrinking googol Back when it was named in 1938, the googol was undeniably large. However, with the invention of fast computers and fast algorithms, computation with numbers the size of a googol has become routine. For example, even the difficult problem of prime factorization is now fairly accessible for 100-digit numbers. Computations of a googol steps are still completely out of reach. Googolplex A googolplex is 1 followed by a googol of zeroes, or ten raised to the power of a googol: Googol and comparable large numbers Miscellanea See also | ||||||||
|
| |||||||||
 |
|
| |