As you may have read, the name Google originated from the misspelling by Larry Page and Sergey Brin of the word googol, a number whose value is 10^1001. This word, in turn, was coined by a child, the nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner (1878-1955) in 1940. As the story goes:
“Dr. Kasner's nine-year-old nephew [Milton] was asked to think up a name for a very big number, namely 1 with one hundred zeroes 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. It was first suggested that a googolplex should be 1, followed by writing zeros until you got tired. This is a description of what would happen if one tried to write a googolplex, but different people get ti…
