Googol

A googol is the large number 10100. In decimal notation, it is written as the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeroes: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Its systematic name is 10 duotrigintillion. (The short scale names are standard in the English-speaking world.) The term was coined in 1920 by 9-year-old Milton Sirotta (1911–1981), nephew of U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner. He may have been inspired by the contemporary comic strip character Barney Google. Kasner popularized the concept in his 1940 book Mathematics and the Imagination. Other names for this quantity include ten duotrigintillion on the short scale, ten thousand sexdecillion on the long scale, or ten sexdecilliard on the Peletier long scale. A googol has no special significance in mathematics. However, it is useful when comparing with other very large quantities such as the number of subatomic particles in the visible universe or the number of hypothetical possibilities in a chess game. Kasner used it to illustrate the difference between an unimaginably large number and infinity, and in this role it is sometimes used in teaching mathematics. To put in perspective the size of a googol, the mass of an electron, just under e-30kg, can be compared to the mass of the visible universe, estimated at between e50 and e60kg. It is a ratio in the order of about 1080 to 1090, or at most one ten-billionth of a googol (0.00000001% of a googol). Another way of illustrating the immense size of a googol is to picture the Frontier supercomputer, which as of 2022 is the most powerful supercomputer in the world and measures 680 m2 (7,300 sq ft), almost exactly the same size of a basketball court with run-offs and sidelines. The Frontier is capable of making 1,102,000 TFLOPs (1.1 quintillion calculations per second).