What is a googol and how do we name absurdly large numbers?
The Googol Leap
What is a googol and how do we name absurdly large numbers?
Once upon a time, a mathematician asked his nine-year-old nephew to invent a name for a truly gigantic number. The boy thought hard, scrunched up his face, and blurted out a wonderfully silly word: "Googol." And just like that, a real number got a name made up by a kid.
So what IS a googol? It's a 1 followed by one hundred zeros. Not ten zeros, not twenty — one hundred of them, marching in a row. If you wrote one zero per second, you'd be done in under two minutes. Easy. The number itself, though, is anything but small.
