EntranceTen to the hundredth power is called as. The largest number in the world
As a child, I was tormented by the question of what the largest number exists, and I tormented almost everyone with this stupid question. Having learned the number one million, I asked if there was a number greater than a million. Billion? How about more than a billion? Trillion? How about more than a trillion? Finally, there was someone smart who explained to me that the question was stupid, since it is enough just to add one to the largest number, and it turns out that it was never the largest, since there are even larger numbers.
And so, many years later, I decided to ask myself another question, namely: What is the largest number that has its own name? Fortunately, now there is the Internet and you can puzzle patient search engines with it, which will not call my questions idiotic ;-). Actually, that’s what I did, and this is what I found out as a result.
| Number | Latin name | Russian prefix |
| 1 | unus | an- |
| 2 | duo | duo- |
| 3 | tres | three- |
| 4 | quattuor | quadri- |
| 5 | quinque | quinti- |
| 6 | sex | sexty |
| 7 | septem | septi- |
| 8 | octo | octi- |
| 9 | novem | noni- |
| 10 | decem | deci- |
There are two systems for naming numbers - American and English.
The American system is built quite simply. All names of large numbers are constructed like this: at the beginning there is a Latin ordinal number, and at the end the suffix -million is added to it. An exception is the name "million" which is the name of the number thousand (lat. mille) and the magnifying suffix -illion (see table). This is how we get the numbers trillion, quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion, nonillion and decillion. The American system is used in the USA, Canada, France and Russia. You can find out the number of zeros in a number written according to the American system using the simple formula 3 x + 3 (where x is a Latin numeral).
The English naming system is the most common in the world. It is used, for example, in Great Britain and Spain, as well as in most former English and Spanish colonies. The names of numbers in this system are built like this: like this: the suffix -million is added to the Latin numeral, the next number (1000 times larger) is built according to the principle - the same Latin numeral, but the suffix - billion. That is, after a trillion in the English system there is a trillion, and only then a quadrillion, followed by a quadrillion, etc. Thus, a quadrillion according to the English and American systems are completely different numbers! You can find out the number of zeros in a number written according to the English system and ending with the suffix -million, using the formula 6 x + 3 (where x is a Latin numeral) and using the formula 6 x + 6 for numbers ending in - billion.
Only the number billion (10 9) passed from the English system into the Russian language, which would still be more correct to be called as the Americans call it - billion, since we have adopted the American system. But who in our country does anything according to the rules! ;-) By the way, sometimes the word trillion is used in Russian (you can see this for yourself by running a search in Google or Yandex) and it means, apparently, 1000 trillion, i.e. quadrillion.
In addition to numbers written using Latin prefixes according to the American or English system, so-called non-system numbers are also known, i.e. numbers that have their own names without any Latin prefixes. There are several such numbers, but I will tell you more about them a little later.
Let's return to writing using Latin numerals. It would seem that they can write down numbers to infinity, but this is not entirely true. Now I will explain why. Let's first see what the numbers from 1 to 10 33 are called:
| Name | Number |
| Unit | 10 0 |
| Ten | 10 1 |
| One hundred | 10 2 |
| Thousand | 10 3 |
| Million | 10 6 |
| Billion | 10 9 |
| Trillion | 10 12 |
| Quadrillion | 10 15 |
| Quintillion | 10 18 |
| Sextillion | 10 21 |
| Septillion | 10 24 |
| Octillion | 10 27 |
| Quintillion | 10 30 |
| Decillion | 10 33 |
And now the question arises, what next. What's behind the decillion? In principle, it is, of course, possible, by combining prefixes, to generate such monsters as: andecillion, duodecillion, tredecillion, quattordecillion, quindecillion, sexdecillion, septemdecillion, octodecillion and novemdecillion, but these will already be compound names, and we were interested in our own names numbers. Therefore, according to this system, in addition to those indicated above, you can still get only three proper names - vigintillion (from Lat. viginti- twenty), centillion (from lat. centum- one hundred) and million (from lat. mille- thousand). The Romans did not have more than a thousand proper names for numbers (all numbers over a thousand were composite). For example, the Romans called a million (1,000,000) decies centena milia, that is, "ten hundred thousand." And now, actually, the table:
Thus, according to such a system, it is impossible to obtain numbers greater than 10 3003, which would have its own, non-compound name! But nevertheless, numbers greater than a million are known - these are the same non-systemic numbers. Let's finally talk about them.
| Name | Number |
| Myriad | 10 4 |
| 10 100 | |
| Asankheya | 10 140 |
| Googolplex | 10 10 100 |
| Second Skewes number | 10 10 10 1000 |
| Mega | 2 (in Moser notation) |
| Megiston | 10 (in Moser notation) |
| Moser | 2 (in Moser notation) |
| Graham number | G 63 (in Graham notation) |
| Stasplex | G 100 (in Graham notation) |
The smallest such number is myriad(it is even in Dahl’s dictionary), which means a hundred hundreds, that is, 10,000. This word, however, is outdated and practically not used, but it is curious that the word “myriads” is widely used, which does not mean a specific number at all, but countless, uncountable multitudes of something. It is believed that the word myriad (English: myriad) came into European languages from ancient Egypt.
Google(from the English googol) is the number ten to the hundredth power, that is, one followed by one hundred zeros. The "googol" was first written about in 1938 in the article "New Names in Mathematics" in the January issue of the journal Scripta Mathematica by the American mathematician Edward Kasner. According to him, it was his nine-year-old nephew Milton Sirotta who suggested calling the large number a “googol”. This number became generally known thanks to the search engine named after it. Google. Please note that "Google" is a brand name and googol is a number.
In the famous Buddhist treatise Jaina Sutra, dating back to 100 BC, the number appears asankheya(from China asenzi- uncountable), equal to 10 140. It is believed that this number is equal to the number of cosmic cycles required to achieve nirvana.
Googolplex(English) googolplex) - a number also invented by Kasner and his nephew and meaning one with a googol of zeros, that is, 10 10 100. This is how Kasner himself describes this “discovery”:
Words of wisdom are spoken by children at least as often as by scientists. The name "googol" was invented by a child (Dr. Kasner's nine-year-old nephew) who was asked to think up a name for a very big number, namely, 1 with a hundred zeros after it. He was very certain that this number was not infinite, and therefore equally certain that it had to have a name. At the same time that he suggested "googol" he gave a name for a still larger number: "Googolplex." A googolplex is much larger than a googol, but is still finite, as the inventor of the name was quick to point out.
Mathematics and the Imagination(1940) by Kasner and James R. Newman.
An even larger number than the googolplex, the Skewes number, was proposed by Skewes in 1933. J. London Math. Soc. 8 , 277-283, 1933.) in proving the Riemann hypothesis concerning prime numbers. It means e to a degree e to a degree e to the power of 79, that is, e e e 79. Later, te Riele, H. J. J. "On the Sign of the Difference P(x)-Li(x)." Math. Comput. 48 , 323-328, 1987) reduced the Skuse number to e e 27/4, which is approximately equal to 8.185 10 370. It is clear that since the value of the Skuse number depends on the number e, then it is not an integer, so we will not consider it, otherwise we would have to remember other non-natural numbers - pi, e, Avogadro's number, etc.
But it should be noted that there is a second Skuse number, which in mathematics is denoted as Sk 2, which is even greater than the first Skuse number (Sk 1). Second Skewes number, was introduced by J. Skuse in the same article to denote the number up to which the Riemann hypothesis is valid. Sk 2 is equal to 10 10 10 10 3, that is, 10 10 10 1000.
As you understand, the more degrees there are, the more difficult it is to understand which number is greater. For example, looking at Skewes numbers, without special calculations, it is almost impossible to understand which of these two numbers is larger. Thus, for super-large numbers it becomes inconvenient to use powers. Moreover, you can come up with such numbers (and they have already been invented) when the degrees of degrees simply do not fit on the page. Yes, that's on the page! They won’t fit even into a book the size of the entire Universe! In this case, the question arises of how to write them down. The problem, as you understand, is solvable, and mathematicians have developed several principles for writing such numbers. True, every mathematician who wondered about this problem came up with his own way of writing, which led to the existence of several, unrelated to each other, methods for writing numbers - these are the notations of Knuth, Conway, Steinhouse, etc.
Consider the notation of Hugo Stenhouse (H. Steinhaus. Mathematical Snapshots, 3rd edn. 1983), which is quite simple. Stein House suggested writing large numbers inside geometric shapes - triangle, square and circle:
Steinhouse came up with two new superlarge numbers. He named the number - Mega, and the number is Megiston.
Mathematician Leo Moser refined Stenhouse's notation, which was limited by the fact that if it was necessary to write down numbers much larger than a megiston, difficulties and inconveniences arose, since many circles had to be drawn one inside the other. Moser suggested that after the squares, draw not circles, but pentagons, then hexagons, and so on. He also proposed a formal notation for these polygons so that numbers could be written without drawing complex pictures. Moser notation looks like this:
Thus, according to Moser's notation, Steinhouse's mega is written as 2, and megiston as 10. In addition, Leo Moser proposed calling a polygon with the number of sides equal to mega - megagon. And he proposed the number “2 in Megagon”, that is, 2. This number became known as Moser’s number or simply as moser.
But Moser is not the largest number. The largest number ever used in mathematical proof is the limit known as Graham number(Graham's number), first used in 1977 in the proof of one estimate in Ramsey theory. It is associated with bichromatic hypercubes and cannot be expressed without a special 64-level system of special mathematical symbols introduced by Knuth in 1976.
Unfortunately, a number written in Knuth's notation cannot be converted into notation in the Moser system. Therefore, we will have to explain this system too. In principle, there is nothing complicated about it either. Donald Knuth (yes, yes, this is the same Knuth who wrote “The Art of Programming” and created the TeX editor) came up with the concept of superpower, which he proposed to write with arrows pointing upward:
In general it looks like this:
I think everything is clear, so let’s return to Graham’s number. Graham proposed so-called G-numbers:
The number G 63 began to be called Graham number(it is often designated simply as G). This number is the largest known number in the world and is even listed in the Guinness Book of Records. Well, the Graham number is greater than the Moser number.
P.S. In order to bring great benefit to all humanity and become famous throughout the centuries, I decided to come up with and name the largest number myself. This number will be called stasplex and it is equal to the number G 100. Remember it, and when your children ask what is the largest number in the world, tell them that this number is called stasplex.
Update (4.09.2003): Thank you all for the comments. It turned out that I made several mistakes when writing the text. I'll try to fix it now.
- I made several mistakes just by mentioning Avogadro's number. First, several people pointed out to me that 6.022 10 23 is, in fact, the most natural number. And secondly, there is an opinion, and it seems correct to me, that Avogadro’s number is not a number at all in the proper, mathematical sense of the word, since it depends on the system of units. Now it is expressed in “mol -1”, but if it is expressed, for example, in moles or something else, then it will be expressed as a completely different number, but this will not cease to be Avogadro’s number at all.
- 10,000 - darkness
100,000 - legion
1,000,000 - leodr
10,000,000 - raven or corvid
100,000,000 - deck
Interestingly, the ancient Slavs also loved large numbers and were able to count to a billion. Moreover, they called such an account a “small account.” In some manuscripts, the authors also considered the “great count”, reaching the number 10 50. About numbers greater than 10 50 it was said: “And more than this cannot be understood by the human mind.” The names used in the “small count” were transferred to the “great count”, but with a different meaning. So, darkness no longer meant 10,000, but a million, legion - the darkness of those (a million millions); leodre - legion of legions (10 to the 24th degree), then it was said - ten leodres, one hundred leodres, ..., and finally, one hundred thousand those legion of leodres (10 to 47); leodr leodrov (10 in 48) was called a raven and, finally, a deck (10 in 49). - The topic of national names of numbers can be expanded if we remember about the Japanese system of naming numbers that I had forgotten, which is very different from the English and American systems (I won’t draw hieroglyphs, if anyone is interested, they are):
10 0 - ichi
10 1 - jyuu
10 2 - hyaku
10 3 - sen
10 4 - man
10 8 - oku
10 12 - chou
10 16 - kei
10 20 - gai
10 24 - jyo
10 28 - jyou
10 32 - kou
10 36 - kan
10 40 - sei
10 44 - sai
10 48 - goku
10 52 - gougasya
10 56 - asougi
10 60 - nayuta
10 64 - fukashigi
10 68 - muryoutaisuu - Regarding the numbers of Hugo Steinhaus (in Russia for some reason his name was translated as Hugo Steinhaus). botev assures that the idea of writing superlarge numbers in the form of numbers in circles belongs not to Steinhouse, but to Daniil Kharms, who long before him published this idea in the article “Raising a Number.” I also want to thank Evgeniy Sklyarevsky, the author of the most interesting site on entertaining mathematics on the Russian-language Internet - Arbuza, for the information that Steinhouse came up with not only the numbers mega and megiston, but also suggested another number medical zone, equal (in his notation) to "3 in a circle".
- Now about the number myriad or mirioi. There are different opinions about the origin of this number. Some believe that it originated in Egypt, while others believe that it was born only in Ancient Greece. Be that as it may in fact, the myriad gained fame precisely thanks to the Greeks. Myriad was the name for 10,000, but there were no names for numbers greater than ten thousand. However, in his note “Psammit” (i.e., calculus of sand), Archimedes showed how to systematically construct and name arbitrarily large numbers. In particular, placing 10,000 (myriad) grains of sand in a poppy seed, he finds that in the Universe (a ball with a diameter of a myriad of the diameters of the Earth) no more than 10 63 grains of sand could fit (in our notation). It is curious that modern calculations of the number of atoms in the visible Universe lead to the number 10 67 (in total a myriad of times more). Archimedes suggested the following names for the numbers:
1 myriad = 10 4 .
1 di-myriad = myriad of myriads = 10 8 .
1 tri-myriad = di-myriad di-myriad = 10 16 .
1 tetra-myriad = three-myriad three-myriad = 10 32 .
etc.
If you have any comments -
There are numbers that are so incredibly, incredibly large that it would take the entire universe to even write them down. But here's what's really crazy... some of these unfathomably large numbers are crucial to understanding the world.
When I say “the largest number in the universe,” I really mean the largest significant number, the maximum possible number that is useful in some way. There are many contenders for this title, but I'll warn you right away: there really is a risk that trying to understand it all will blow your mind. And besides, with too much math, you won't have much fun.
Googol and googolplex
Edward Kasner
We could start with what are quite possibly the two largest numbers you've ever heard of, and these are indeed the two largest numbers that have generally accepted definitions in the English language. (There is a fairly precise nomenclature used to denote numbers as large as you would like, but these two numbers you will not find in dictionaries nowadays.) Googol, since it became world famous (albeit with errors, note. in fact it is googol) in the form of Google, born in 1920 as a way to get children interested in big numbers.
To this end, Edward Kasner (pictured) took his two nephews, Milton and Edwin Sirott, for a walk through the New Jersey Palisades. He invited them to come up with any ideas, and then nine-year-old Milton suggested “googol.” Where he got this word from is unknown, but Kasner decided that 
or a number in which one hundred zeros follow the unit will henceforth be called a googol.
But young Milton did not stop there; he proposed an even larger number, the googolplex. This is a number, according to Milton, in which the first place is 1, and then as many zeros as you could write before you got tired. While the idea is fascinating, Kasner decided a more formal definition was needed. As he explained in his 1940 book Mathematics and the Imagination, Milton's definition leaves open the risky possibility that an accidental buffoon could become a mathematician superior to Albert Einstein simply because he has greater stamina.
So Kasner decided that a googolplex would be , or 1, and then a googol of zeros. Otherwise, and in notation similar to that which we will deal with for other numbers, we will say that a googolplex is . To show how fascinating this is, Carl Sagan once noted that it is physically impossible to write down all the zeros of a googolplex because there simply isn't enough space in the universe. If we fill the entire volume of the observable Universe with small dust particles approximately 1.5 microns in size, then the number of different ways these particles can be arranged will be approximately equal to one googolplex.
Linguistically speaking, googol and googolplex are probably the two largest significant numbers (at least in the English language), but, as we will now establish, there are infinitely many ways to define “significance.”
Real world
If we talk about the largest significant number, there is a reasonable argument that this really means that we need to find the largest number with a value that actually exists in the world. We can start with the current human population, which is currently around 6920 million. World GDP in 2010 was estimated to be around $61,960 billion, but both of these numbers are insignificant compared to the approximately 100 trillion cells that make up the human body. Of course, none of these numbers can compare to the total number of particles in the Universe, which is generally considered to be approximately , and this number is so large that our language has no word for it.
We can play a little with the systems of measures, making the numbers larger and larger. Thus, the mass of the Sun in tons will be less than in pounds. A great way to do this is to use the Planck system of units, which are the smallest possible measures for which the laws of physics still apply. For example, the age of the Universe in Planck time is about . If we go back to the first Planck unit of time after the Big Bang, we will see that the density of the Universe was then . We're getting more and more, but we haven't even reached googol yet.
The largest number with any real world application - or in this case real world application - is probably one of the latest estimates of the number of universes in the multiverse. This number is so large that the human brain will literally not be able to perceive all these different universes, since the brain is only capable of approximately configurations. In fact, this number is probably the largest number that makes any practical sense unless you take into account the idea of the multiverse as a whole. However, there are still much larger numbers lurking there. But to find them we must go into the realm of pure mathematics, and there is no better place to start than prime numbers.
Mersenne primes
Part of the challenge is coming up with a good definition of what a “significant” number is. One way is to think in terms of prime and composite numbers. A prime number, as you probably remember from school mathematics, is any natural number (note not equal to one) that is divisible only by and itself. So, and are prime numbers, and and are composite numbers. This means that any composite number can ultimately be represented by its prime factors. In some ways, the number is more important than, say, , because there is no way to express it in terms of the product of smaller numbers.
Obviously we can go a little further. , for example, is actually just , which means that in a hypothetical world where our knowledge of numbers is limited to , a mathematician can still express the number . But the next number is prime, which means that the only way to express it is to directly know about its existence. This means that the largest known prime numbers play an important role, but, say, a googol - which is ultimately just a collection of numbers and , multiplied together - actually does not. And since prime numbers are basically random, there is no known way to predict that an incredibly large number will actually be prime. To this day, discovering new prime numbers is a difficult undertaking.
Mathematicians of Ancient Greece had a concept of prime numbers at least as early as 500 BC, and 2000 years later people still knew which numbers were prime only up to about 750. Thinkers from Euclid's time saw the possibility of simplification, but it wasn't until the Renaissance mathematicians could not really use it in practice. These numbers are known as Mersenne numbers, named after the 17th century French scientist Marin Mersenne. The idea is quite simple: a Mersenne number is any number of the form . So, for example, , and this number is prime, the same is true for .
It is much faster and easier to determine Mersenne primes than any other kind of prime number, and computers have been hard at work searching for them for the past six decades. Until 1952, the largest known prime number was a number—a number with digits. In the same year, the computer calculated that the number is prime, and this number consists of digits, which makes it much larger than a googol.
Computers have been on the hunt ever since, and currently the Mersenne number is the largest prime number known to mankind. Discovered in 2008, it amounts to a number with almost millions of digits. It is the largest known number that cannot be expressed in terms of any smaller numbers, and if you want help finding an even larger Mersenne number, you (and your computer) can always join the search at http://www.mersenne. org/.
Skewes number
Stanley Skewes
Let's look at prime numbers again. As I said, they behave fundamentally wrong, meaning that there is no way to predict what the next prime number will be. Mathematicians have been forced to resort to some pretty fantastic measurements to come up with some way to predict future prime numbers, even in some nebulous way. The most successful of these attempts is probably the prime number counting function, which was invented in the late 18th century by the legendary mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss.
I'll spare you the more complicated math - we have a lot more to come anyway - but the gist of the function is this: for any integer, you can estimate how many prime numbers there are that are smaller than . For example, if , the function predicts that there should be prime numbers, if there should be prime numbers smaller than , and if , then there should be smaller numbers that are prime.
The arrangement of the prime numbers is indeed irregular and is only an approximation of the actual number of prime numbers. In fact, we know that there are prime numbers less than , prime numbers less than , and prime numbers less than . This is an excellent estimate, to be sure, but it is always only an estimate... and, more specifically, an estimate from above.
In all known cases up to , the function that finds the number of primes slightly overestimates the actual number of primes smaller than . Mathematicians once thought that this would always be the case, ad infinitum, and that this would certainly apply to some unimaginably huge numbers, but in 1914 John Edensor Littlewood proved that for some unknown, unimaginably huge number, this function would begin to produce fewer primes, and then it will switch between the top estimate and the bottom estimate an infinite number of times.
The hunt was for the starting point of the races, and then Stanley Skewes appeared (see photo). In 1933, he proved that the upper limit when a function approximating the number of prime numbers first produces a smaller value is the number . It is difficult to truly understand even in the most abstract sense what this number actually represents, and from this point of view it was the largest number ever used in a serious mathematical proof. Mathematicians have since been able to reduce the upper bound to a relatively small number, but the original number remains known as the Skewes number.
So how big is the number that dwarfs even the mighty googolplex? In The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers, David Wells recounts one way in which the mathematician Hardy was able to conceptualize the size of the Skuse number:
“Hardy thought it was “the largest number ever served for any particular purpose in mathematics,” and suggested that if a game of chess were played with all the particles of the universe as pieces, one move would consist of swapping two particles, and the game would stop when the same position was repeated a third time, then the number of all possible games would be approximately equal to Skuse's number.'
One last thing before we move on: we talked about the smaller of the two Skewes numbers. There is another Skuse number, which the mathematician discovered in 1955. The first number is derived from the fact that the so-called Riemann hypothesis is true - this is a particularly difficult hypothesis in mathematics that remains unproven, very useful when it comes to prime numbers. However, if the Riemann hypothesis is false, Skuse found that the starting point of the jumps increases to .
Problem of magnitude
Before we get to the number that makes even the Skewes number look tiny, we need to talk a little about scale, because otherwise we have no way of assessing where we're going to go. First let's take a number - it's a tiny number, so small that people can actually have an intuitive understanding of what it means. There are very few numbers that fit this description, since numbers greater than six cease to be separate numbers and become “several”, “many”, etc.
Now let's take , i.e. . Although we actually cannot intuitively, as we did for the number, understand what it is, it is very easy to imagine what it is. So far so good. But what happens if we move to ? This is equal to , or . We are very far from being able to imagine this quantity, like any other very large one - we lose the ability to comprehend individual parts somewhere around a million. (Admittedly, it would take an insanely long time to actually count to a million of anything, but the point is that we are still capable of perceiving that number.)
However, although we cannot imagine, we are at least able to understand in general terms what 7600 billion is, perhaps by comparing it to something like US GDP. We have moved from intuition to representation to simple understanding, but at least we still have some gap in our understanding of what a number is. That's about to change as we move another rung up the ladder.
To do this, we need to move to a notation introduced by Donald Knuth, known as arrow notation. This notation can be written as . When we then go to , the number we get will be . This is equal to where the total of threes is. We have now far and truly surpassed all the other numbers we have already talked about. After all, even the largest of them had only three or four terms in the indicator series. For example, even the super-Skuse number is “only” - even with the allowance for the fact that both the base and the exponents are much larger than , it is still absolutely nothing compared to the size of a number tower with a billion members.
Obviously, there is no way to comprehend such huge numbers... and yet, the process by which they are created can still be understood. We couldn't understand the real quantity that is given by a tower of powers with a billion triplets, but we can basically imagine such a tower with many terms, and a really decent supercomputer would be able to store such towers in memory even if it couldn't calculate their actual values .
This is becoming more and more abstract, but it will only get worse. You might think that a tower of degrees whose exponent length is equal (indeed, in the previous version of this post I made exactly this mistake), but it is simple. In other words, imagine being able to calculate the exact value of a power tower of triplets that is made up of elements, and then you took that value and created a new tower with as many in it as... that gives .
Repeat this process with each subsequent number ( note starting from the right) until you do it times, and then finally you get . This is a number that is simply incredibly large, but at least the steps to get it seem understandable if you do everything very slowly. We can no longer understand the numbers or imagine the procedure by which they are obtained, but at least we can understand the basic algorithm, only in a long enough time.
Now let's prepare the mind to really blow it.
Graham number (Graham)
Ronald Graham
This is how you get Graham's number, which holds a place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest number ever used in a mathematical proof. It is absolutely impossible to imagine how big it is, and equally difficult to explain exactly what it is. Basically, Graham's number appears when dealing with hypercubes, which are theoretical geometric shapes with more than three dimensions. Mathematician Ronald Graham (see photo) wanted to find out at what smallest number of dimensions certain properties of a hypercube would remain stable. (Sorry for such a vague explanation, but I'm sure we all need to get at least two degrees in math to make it more accurate.)
In any case, Graham's number is an upper estimate of this minimum number of dimensions. So how big is this upper bound? Let's return to the number, so large that we can only vaguely understand the algorithm for obtaining it. Now, instead of just jumping up one more level to , we will count the number that has arrows between the first and last three. We are now far beyond even the slightest understanding of what this number is or even what we need to do to calculate it.
Now let's repeat this process once ( note at each next step we write the number of arrows equal to the number obtained in the previous step).
This, ladies and gentlemen, is Graham's number, which is about an order of magnitude higher than the point of human understanding. It is a number that is so much greater than any number you can imagine—it is so much greater than any infinity you could ever hope to imagine—it simply defies even the most abstract description.
But here's a strange thing. Since the Graham number is basically just triplets multiplied together, we know some of its properties without actually calculating it. We can't represent the Graham number using any familiar notation, even if we used the entire universe to write it down, but I can tell you the last twelve digits of the Graham number right now: . And that's not all: we know at least the last digits of Graham's number.
Of course, it's worth remembering that this number is only an upper bound in Graham's original problem. It is quite possible that the actual number of measurements required to achieve the desired property is much, much less. In fact, it has been believed since the 1980s, according to most experts in the field, that there are actually only six dimensions—a number so small that we can understand it intuitively. The lower bound has since been raised to , but there is still a very good chance that the solution to Graham's problem does not lie anywhere near a number as large as Graham's number.
Towards infinity
So are there numbers greater than Graham's number? There is, of course, for starters there is the Graham number. As for the significant number... well, there are some fiendishly complex areas of mathematics (particularly the area known as combinatorics) and computer science in which numbers even larger than Graham's number occur. But we have almost reached the limit of what I can hope will ever be rationally explained. For those foolhardy enough to go even further, further reading is suggested at your own risk.
Well, now an amazing quote that is attributed to Douglas Ray ( note Honestly, it sounds pretty funny:
“I see clusters of vague numbers that are hidden there in the darkness, behind the small spot of light that the candle of reason gives. They whisper to each other; conspiring about who knows what. Perhaps they don't like us very much for capturing their little brothers in our minds. Or perhaps they simply lead a single-digit life, out there, beyond our understanding.
History of the term
A googol is larger than the number of particles in the known part of the Universe, which, according to various estimates, number from 10 79 to 10 81, which also limits its use.
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
See what “Googol” is in other dictionaries:
Googolplex (from the English googolplex) a number represented by a unit with a googol of zeros, 1010100. or 1010 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 Like Google,... ... Wikipedia
This article is about numbers. See also the article about English. googol) a number represented by a unit with 100 zeros in the decimal number system: 10100 = 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 00 0 000 000 000 000 000 ... Wikipedia
- (from the English googolplex) a number equal to ten to the power of googol: 1010100 or 1010 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 00 0 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000. Like googol, the term ... ... Wikipedia
This article may contain original research. Add links to sources, otherwise it may be set for deletion. More information may be on the talk page. (May 13, 2011) ... Wikipedia
Gogol mogol is a dessert whose main components are beaten egg yolk with sugar. There are many variations of this drink: with the addition of wine, vanillin, rum, bread, honey, fruit and berry juices. Often used as a treatment... Wikipedia
Nominal names of powers of thousand in ascending order Name Meaning American system European system thousand 10³ 10³ million 106 106 billion 109 109 billion 109 1012 trillion 1012 ... Wikipedia
Nominal names of powers of thousand in ascending order Name Meaning American system European system thousand 10³ 10³ million 106 106 billion 109 109 billion 109 1012 trillion 1012 ... Wikipedia
Nominal names of powers of thousand in ascending order Name Meaning American system European system thousand 10³ 10³ million 106 106 billion 109 109 billion 109 1012 trillion 1012 ... Wikipedia
Nominal names of powers of thousand in ascending order Name Meaning American system European system thousand 10³ 10³ million 106 106 billion 109 109 billion 109 1012 trillion 1012 ... Wikipedia
Books
- Magic of the World. Fantastic novel and stories, Vladimir Sigismundovich Vechfinsky. Novel "The Magic of Space". The earth magician, together with the fairy-tale heroes Vasilisa, Koshchei, Gorynych and the fairy-tale cat, are fighting the force that seeks to take over the Galaxy. COLLECTION OF STORIES Where...
The famous search engine, as well as the company that created this system and many other products, is named after the googol number - one of the largest numbers in the infinite set of natural numbers. However, the largest number is not even a googol, but a googolplex.
The googolplex number was first proposed by Edward Kasner in 1938; it represents a one followed by an incredible number of zeros. The name comes from another number - googol - one followed by a hundred zeros. Usually the number googol is written as 10 100, or 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000.
Googolplex, in turn, is the number ten to the power of googol. It's usually written like this: 10 10 ^100, and that's a lot, a lot of zeros. There are so many of them that if you decided to count the number of zeros using individual particles in the universe, you would run out of particles before you ran out of zeros in the googolplex.
According to Carl Sagan, writing this number is impossible because writing it would require more space than exists in the visible universe.
How does “brainmail” work - transmitting messages from brain to brain via the Internet
10 mysteries of the world that science has finally revealed 10 main questions about the Universe that scientists are looking for answers to right now 8 things science can't explain 2,500-Year-Old Scientific Mystery: Why We Yawn Is it possible to realize the abilities of superheroes with the help of modern technology? Atom, luster, nuctemeron, and seven more units of time that you haven't heard of Parallel universes may actually exist, according to a new theory
