Ever wondered where the name "GOOGLE" comes from?
Googol and Googolplex
We might as well begin with what are quite probably the two largest numbers you've ever heard of, and are in fact the two largest numbers with commonly accepted definitions in the English language. (There's a fairly robust nomenclature available for naming numbers as high as you want to go, but you won't find these in dictionaries at the present time.) The googol, which has since become world famous (albeit misspelled) in the form of Google, began life in 1920 as a way to get children interested in large numbers.
To that end, mathematician Edward Kasner (pictured) took his two nephews, Milton and Edwin Sirotta, on a walk through the New Jersey Palisades. He asked them for any ideas they might have, and the then nine-year-old Milton proposed "googol." Where he got this particular word is unknown, but Kasner decided that 10^100 - or, the number one followed by a hundred zeroes - would henceforth be known as a googol.
But young Milton wasn't finished - he also proposed an even larger number, the googolplex. This number, according to Milton, was 1 followed by as many zeroes as you could write before you got tired. Though a charming idea, Kasner decided a more technical definition was needed. As he explained in his 1940 book Mathematics and the Imagination, Milton's definition left open the dicey possibility that a random buffoon could become a greater mathematician than Albert Einstein simply by possessing greater endurance.
So, Kasner decided a googolplex would be 10^googol, or 1 followed by a googol of zeroes. To put that another way - and in similar notation to how we'll be dealing with various other numbers we'll be talking about - a googolplex is 1010100. To put that in some mindbending perspective, Carl Sagan once pointed out that it would physically impossible to write down all the zeroes in a googolplex, because there simply isn't enough room in the universe. If you filled the entire volume of the observable universe with fine dust particles roughly 1.5 micrometers in size, then the number of different combinations in which you could arrange and number these particles would be about one googolplex.
Linguistically speaking, googol and googolplex are probably the two biggest meaningful numbers (at least in English), but as we're about to find out, there's no end of ways to define "meaningful."
