Of googol

Dunno if you guys already know this, but just thought of sharing...

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 1938 by Milton Sirotta (1929–1980), nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, when he was nine years old. Kasner popularized the concept in his book Mathematics and the Imagination (1940).

Some interesting stuff about this number includes:

• A googol is greater than the number of protons in the universe, which has been variously estimated from 10^79 up to 10^81

• Avogadro's number, 6.02214179 × 10^23, is exactly the number of 12C atoms in 12 grams (0.012 kg) of unbound 12C in its ground state. It is perhaps the most widely known large number from chemistry and physics. Avogadro's number is less than the fourth root of a googol.

• Black holes are presumed to evaporate because they faintly give off Hawking radiation; if so, a supermassive black hole would take about a googol years to evaporate.

• In an episode of the animated series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fast Forward, the "Gaminator" video games system is said to have a "3-googolhertz processor."

• In Back to the Future III, Emmett Brown states that Clara was "One in a googolplex".

The name might have reminded you of the search engine, Google, due to its similarity and a quick search reveal that there's indeed a relation as found in Google's milestone:


In 1997, Larry and Sergey decide that the BackRub search engine needs a new name. After some brainstorming, they go with Google -- a play on the word "googol," a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. The use of the term reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.