What is a googol?

This is the Age of Science and the language of science is mathematics. Since Andy's young readers want to be up to date, they are naturally curious about the fascinating tricks of figures and numbers. The googol is a large item, a very large item, in the orderly parade of figures and nobody is surprised to learn that this big number was invented by a nine year old boy.

The American mathematician Edward Kasner was teaching the tricks of his trade to his nine year old nephew. Numbers of course, begin with one and go on to who knows where. Andy's young readers are always asking about the biggest number or the last number in the world. So we can be reasonably sure that Edward Kasner's nephew wondered about the same problem.

The young student was almost certainly taught that a million is written as a figure one followed by six zeros. Most likely he learned the power of ten, which is a gimmick for writing large figures in mathamatical shorthand. If, in a science text you meet a figure ten, proper size, with a small figure three where you would expect the right ear of the figure ten to be, then you are looking at a number expressed to the power of ten.

That particular shorthand could have been written as 1,000   which is ten multiplied by itself three times. A million is written as ten with a six at the upper righthand corner. It is, of course, ten multiplied by itself six times. When we get to big big numbers, the power of ten shorthand can save a lot of space and countless zeros.

0riclo Edward Kasnerts young pupil no doubt learned the correct number of zeros to add to a billion, a trillion, a quintillion and sextillion. And, no doubt, he briskly wrote all of them down to the power of ten. A sextillion has 21 zeros, but what about a number with 100 zeros? There was at that time no such number, so the young student promptly invented it and, after some serious thought, he named it the googol. This big figure is rather large to go on a page and besides, it is a tiresome job to count out 100 zeros. So we simply write a googol as ten to the 100th power   which is figure ten with a small figure 100 at the upper right hand corner.

You are now wondering what comes after a googol and the answer, of course, is one googol and one. But this is not the end for there is now googolplex   which is a googol multiplied by itself a googol number of times. When you have figured the number of zeros on a googolplex you are ready to invent a still larger number to delight the world of science.