![]() ![]() You could say that a googol is so big that it rises beyond the merely astronomical. What is this author’s idea of REALLY big numbers? Well, before long, we get to a googol (10^100).Ī googol atoms would fill the observable universe about 100 quadrillion times over. We could continue counting up roughly by powers of 1000, moving out beyond the solar system to the stars surrounding the sun and eventually to galaxies and galaxy clusters, and superclusters, outward even to supercluster filaments and membranes…īut if you want to see some REALLY big numbers, we will have to move faster than that. The sun, the true giant in the solar system, has about 4 nonillion (4×10^30) pounds of material. There are more illustrations of the size of things, such as: The author throws in questions about the big numbers – questions challenging enough to get even an adult with a math degree thinking. Since this is still only about the halfway point of the book, you get the idea that when this book talks about really big numbers, it means really big numbers! ![]() On the page facing that one, he says, “Here, let me skip ahead some and show you the names of a few really big ones.” The next page says, “This system goes quite far out but I think that these names lose their novelty after the first 30 or so.” On that page we see spectators sleeping or reading a newspaper. Speaking of a quadrillion and a quintillion, I’ve seen a few other books that explain the names for large numbers, but that’s only about the halfway point of this book! You know things are getting interesting right after the page where he shows You could cover the service of the earth with about a quadrillion (10^15) exercise trampolines.Ī quintillion (10^18) grains of very fine sand would just about cover Atlantic City, NJ, to a depth of 3 feet. You could cram about 20 billion grains of very fine sand into a basketball.ġ00 billion basketballs would fill New York City roughly to the height of a man. If they all lined up, spaced about a foot apart, they would circle 50 times or so around the equator. A few from the beginning of this book include:Ībout 7 billion people live on Earth. You will not be surprised when I say I loved his new book! There are many books that deal with large numbers using analogies. Best wishes, Richard Schwartz”Īnd when I showed him my Pascal’s Triangle Shawl, he gave me the idea of making a new one using congruences mod n. I am particularly proud of what he wrote: “To Sondy, Beautiful cardigan! It looks like we have a lot of the same ideas. Of course I purchased his new book and got it signed. ![]() Full disclosure: When I visited the National Math Festival and met Richard Evan Schwartz, I got all fangirl about his book You Can Count on Monsters and showed him my prime factorization cardigan. ![]()
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