Googol

Googol is a very well-known large number, equal to 10¹⁰⁰ or 1 followed by 100 zeroes. It is also called "ten duotrigintillion" using the short scale.

Coined in the year 1920,¹⁰⁰ it has become very famous as a generic example of a large number , and is what the field of googology and the search engine Google are named after.

History

The term was coined by Edward Kasner's nine-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta in 1920. It was perhaps first published in New Names in Mathematics (1937). The name was most likely influenced by name of the title character of the American comic strip Barney Google and Snuffy Smith, which was very popular at the time. Barney Google's name was in turn inspired by Vincent Vickers' 1939 children's book The Google Book.

In 1998, the search engine Google was founded, which was named after this number. Their company being named after a large number represents the enormous size of the internet.

Properties

The googol is equal to ten duotrigintillion in the short scale, or ten sexdecilliard in the long scale. Googol can be expressed as {10,100} in BEAF, or as E100, E100#1, or E2#2 in Hyper-E notation.

Sbiis Saibian has given the alternative name guppyding.

Aarex Tiaokhiao coined the names unoohol, 100-noogol, and booiolplex for this number.

Username5243 coined the name goodolplex for this number, and it's equal to 10[1]10[1]2 in Username5243's Array Notation.

SuperJedi224 coined the name decigol for this number.

Sizeedit | edit source

There are a mere 10⁸⁰ elementary particles in the observable universe, so googol has little use when measuring real-world quantities. However. it is still much less than the number of Planck volumes in the observable universe (which is about 10¹⁸⁵), so it still has some real-world meaning. Sbiis Saibian showed that a googol particles in a tightly packed sphere would still have a diameter of 5.6 quadrillion meters, or half a light-year.

A cube with edge length 35mm contains about a googol Planck volumes.

Googol is comparable to some numbers produced by combinatorics. For example, 70 factorial (the number of ways 70 distinct objects can be arranged in a row) is about 20% larger than 10¹⁰⁰.

A googol seconds is about a sexvigintillion (10⁸¹) times the estimated age of the universe. A googol angstroms is approximately 100 trevigintillion light-years.

It takes approximately 317 novemvigintillion years to count to a googol one integer at a time. Counting by googols, half googols, or duotrigintillions, of course, one could count there faster but it is not considered kosher in hide-and-seek or googology.

The time it takes for the black hole TON 618 to fully decay due to hawking radiation is about a googol years.

Cultural impact

The definition of googol, googolplex, and similar numbers eventually branched into the field of googology, the study of, nomenclature of, and creation of notations for large numbers.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of the Google search engine, named their company after a pun on googol, as their goal is to cache the mass of data that makes up the World Wide Web.

Googology Wiki has a tongue-in-cheek goal to reach 10¹⁰⁰ articles, which is probably impossible.

Googol was the subject of the £1 million question in a 2001 episode of the British version of the quiz show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, where contestant Charles Ingram cheated his way to the jackpot with the assistance of an aide in the audience.