Large Numbers (1948)

A Classic Paper by J.E. Littlewood

Large Numbers (1948) by J. E. Littlewood (right)

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…