Kerry,
Almost but not quite correct.
A googol is 10 to the 10th power. and a googolplex is 10 to the 10th power
raised to the 100th power !
ie. 10 to the 10 to the 100. In other words, a googolplex is 1 with a googol
of zeros. You will get some idea of the size of this very large but finite
number from the fact that there would not be enough room to write it, if you
went to the farthest star, touring all the nebulae and putting down zeros
every inch of the way. This is a fantastically huge number and a damn good
sounding word.
Sorry to be OT , but I do like a good number ;-)
Tim.
btw, you are absolutely correct about Dr. Kasners 9yo nephew though.
-------
The largest number mathematicians usually deal with is a googolplex
(really). That's 10 to the 100th power, and as Colin noted, greater than
the total number of elementary particles in the known universe (about 10 ^
80).
Let's get really OT--the name googolplex was invented by the American
mathematician Edward Kasner's 9-year-old nephew. Kasner asked the boy to
invent a name for a very large number, bigger than anything that can be put
into words. His nephew called it a "googol," and mathematicians have been
calling it googolplex ever since.
Don't know if you could do it in Lingo--it might be larger than maxInt :-)
Cordially,
Kerry Thompson
Learning Network
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