"That's a great deal to make one word mean," Alice said in a thoughtful tone. "When I make a word do a lot of work like that," said Humpty Dumpty, "I always pay it extra."

Saturday 6 December 2008

Googol

There cannot be many people who use a computer who don’t know what Google is – the largest search engine in the world (and provider of this blog space). But what is a googol?

A googol is the large number ten to the power one hundred or the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeros (in decimal representation). The term was coined in 1938 by Milton Sirotta (1929–1980), nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. Kasner popularized the concept in his book “Mathematics and the Imagination” (1940).


You need a lot more lemmings than this to make a googol!

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