Re: Googling

Henrik Theiling scripsit:

> What strange words you have!  What for?  Not for money, definitely.
> Not for atoms in the universe, either!
A child, the nephew of the American mathematician Edward Kasner, was
asked to name "the largest number he could think of": he gave the name
"googol", and defined it as "1 followed by writing 0s until you get tired."
Kasner objected that this varied from person to person, and asked for
a more definite value: it became definitely "1 with a hundred zeros".
It is not used seriously.

Later, Kasner or another defined "googolplex" as 1 to the googol'th power:
a number too large to write down in the Observable Universe, even using
atoms for digits.

--
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore
        --Douglas Hofstadter

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