DEFINITION
A googol is the large number 10^100, that is, the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeros (in decimal representation). The term was coined in 1920 by
nine-year-
old Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician
Edward Kasner. Kasner popularized the concept in his
book Mathematics and the Imagination.
A googol is of the same order of magnitude as the factorial of 70 (70! being approximately 1.198 googol, or 10 to the power 100.0784), and its only prime factors are 2 and 5 (100 of each). In binary it would take up 333 bits.
The googol is of no particular significance in mathematics, but is useful when comparing with other incredibly large quantities such as the number of subatomic particles in the visible universe or the number of possible chess games. Kasner created it to illustrate the difference between an unimaginably large number and infinity, and in this role it is sometimes used in teaching mathematics.
Indeed, it is not even a round figure. Its formal
name is ten duotrigintillion.
The
Internet search engine Google was named after this number. Larry Page, one of the founders, was fascinated with mathematics and "Googol," even during high school. They ended up with "Google" due to a spelling
mistake.12
The word "google" or "googol," regardless of spelling, suggests the wide-eyed look of a baby, and the comic strip character
Barney Google who began appearing in the 1910s.
A googol can be written in conventional notation as follows:
1 googol =
10100 =
10,00 0,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,
000,00 0,000,00 0,000,00 0,000,000,00 0,000,000,
000,00 0,000,000,0 00,000,0 00,000,0 00,000,000
Its official English number
name is ten duotrigintillion on the
short scale, ten thousand sexdecillion on the
long scale, or ten sexdecilliard on the Peletier
long scale.
HISTORY
When it was named in 1920, the googol was undeniably large. However, with the invention of fast computers and fast algorithms, computation with numbers the size of a googol has become routine. For example, even the difficult problem of prime factorization is now fairly accessible for 100-digit numbers. However, computations of a googol steps are still completely out of reach
