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Revision as of 00:03, 1 January 2003 by Zoe (talk | contribs) (deleting second reference to Google.)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)A googol is the number 10, that is, 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. The term was coined in 1938 by nine-year-old Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. Kasner announced the concept in his book Mathematics and the Imagination.
The googol has no scientific use, and is most often invoked in mathematics teaching. Kasner created it to illustrate the difference between an unimaginably large number and infinity. Although a googol is huge, greater than the number of atoms in the universe, it is quite easy to write down in conventional notation, as follows:
- 1 googol = 10 =
- 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.
A googolplex is ten raised to the power of a googol.
The Internet search engine, Google, was named as a play on the number googol.
- See also: googolgon, googolhedron, duotrigintillion