www.alphadictionary.com

• googol •

Pronunciation: gu-gêl • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: The number represented by a one with a hundred zeroes after it.

Notes: It is important when you are balancing your checkbook that you never confuse a googol with a googolplex, a number with a 1 followed by a googol of zeros. It is easy to do, given the similarity in pronunciation and spelling.

In Play: So, if I'm not a mathematician without enough to occupy my mind, how can I use this word? Funny you should ask. The obvious place is on the invitations to your parties: "Come to our party Saturday night for gaggles of gags and googols of giggles." (That kind of silly hyperbole should limit the attendance to full-time fun-lovers.) If you are totally immune to silly alliteration and hyperbole, you could refer to googols of googly-eyed fans surrounding a rock star. But then most of us wouldn't.

Word History: This word was coined in 1938 by Milton Sirotta, the 9-year-old nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. When Ed asked him for a name for a very large number, he replied with what he thought was a ridiculous word. The Google spelling was taken by the web search engine from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) by Douglas Adams, in which one of Deep Thought's designers asks, "And are you not . . . A greater analyst than the Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity, which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard?" (No, this isn't an April Fool's gag, but a legitimate word spotted by our friend with the eye for funny words at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, Ray Johnson.)

The venerable Dr. Isaac Asimov had a knack for explaining things - many things, on a plethora of topics - in words that laymen could understand. In his book "Realm of Numbers" he discusses the numbers google and googleplex. As I recall, he described a googleplex thusly: If you tried to write out the number googleplex, and the size of each zero in the number was the size of a dot over an "i" on this page, the entire surface of the earth would be insufficient to write the entire number.

Now THAT'S a number!

Of what use are numbers that large? I believe that either a google, or possibly a googleplex (I do not remember which) at the time was the largest number used in a mathematical proof.

C Freund

I had trouble with simple grade school arithmetic.

Then there are the infinite series, such as pi: 3.1416 is all I ever need, but it has been extracted to hundreds of places.

The campus of Google's headquarters is called the Googleplex, a wonderful mathematical pun.

MANY hundreds of places. Wikipedia say 10**13 digits.

Are infinities included in googols? And puzzles?
Why are the sequences of counting numbers, even numbers, and odd numbers all equal to one another?

"Are infinities included in googols?"
No. googol is a specific integer and is small number when compared to infinity. (I don't know anything about the size of a puzzle.)

To paraphrase "Amazing Grace"
When we have been singing a googol of years, we will have no less time to sing God's praise than ere we first begun

According to a friend who is a mathematician, infinities have magnitude; some are larger than others. Since the set of all even numbers and the set of all odd numbers are both infinite and are both included in the set of all numbers, the infinite set of all numbers is larger than the either the set of all even numbers or the set of all odd numbers.

Logically, the set of all numbers should be twice the set of either odd or even numbers. Since all three are infinite, one can postulate infinity times two. And if so why not infinity squared?

My concept of infinity is pretty much equivalent to what used to be called "machine infinity," at least in relation to home computers. It was said that if you wrote out, in any programming language usable with such a machine, [machine infinity] + 1, your machine would freeze. It would be so badly frozen that even the power switch would be of no use. You'd have to pull the plug.

That's me if I try to comprehend things like magnitudes of infinity or infinity squared. And I like math.

It just occurred to me that this is related to something that happened with a computer I had access to many years ago. I was making some entries in a database program, and after record #138, the next one was a twelve- or thirteen-digit number that started with 139. I think all those blank records overwrote the operating system, because when I aborted the program and rebooted, I got a "missing operating system" error message and had to reinstall Windows!

postby bnjtokyo » Wed Nov 26, 2014 8:39 pm

According to a friend who is a mathematician, infinities have magnitude; some are larger than others. Since the set of all even numbers and the set of all odd numbers are both infinite and are both included in the set of all numbers, the infinite set of all numbers is larger than the either the set of all even numbers or the set of all odd numbers.

It is true that infinities have magnitudes: the set of real numbers (like 3.1415... etc.) is larger than the set of integer numbers. However the three sets of integer numbers, even numbers and odd numbers are all of the same magnitude. Without being too technical it suffices to notice, for instance, that each integer number n corresponds to a unique even number 2n, and vice-versa each even number n corresponds to a unique integer n/2.