A googol is a number invented by mathematician Edward Kasner in 1920, equal to 10 to the hundredth power. It was popularized in his 1940 book and is used to visualize larger numbers. Google’s name is a misspelling of googol, and Larry Page named the company after the number. There are larger numbers, such as Graham’s number and Skewes’ number, but a googol is still a useful reference point.
A googol is a huge amount, from 10 to the hundredth power (10100, or 1 followed by 100 zeros. The number was invented by Edward Kasner, an American mathematician, who popularized the number in his 1940 book, Mathematics and the Imagination Although this number was not popularized until 1940, the term was originally coined in 1920, by Kasner’s 9-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta, at the same time, he also came up with the idea of a googolplex, which is one followed by a googol zeros.
The word has today been overshadowed by the familiar search engine-driven word Google, whose name originates from a misspelling of googol. Like the even larger googolplex, Google’s headquarters in Mountain View is known as the Googleplex. Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, was fascinated by mathematics all his life and decided to name the company after the number.
When originally composed, a googol was the largest number known at the time. Today, there are a number of larger numbers, such as Graham’s number or Skewes’ number, which can be analyzed by supercomputers. A centillion, or 1 followed by 303 zeros, is another larger number. Of course, it is trivial for any mathematician to invent a larger number of these using arbitrary notions.
While the googol number by itself has no mathematical meaning, it’s a nice reference point to use to visualize other, much larger numbers, such as the number of particles in the universe (about 1080) or the number of possible chess games ( about 10130). 70!, or 70 factorial, which is 1x2x3… up to 70, is just over a googol, with a value of about 1.2 x 10100. The prime factors of a number have been determined, as well as those of other numbers to 100 figures, thanks to modern computers.
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