Thursday, September 22, 2005

What is a googleplex?

Any numbers hound (and Rob's four-year-old son) knows that a googol is a 1 with a hundred zeroes after it (10 to the hundredth power), and a googolplex is a one with a googol zeroes after it (10 to the googolth power).

After thinking about buying The Google Legacy by Stephen E. Arnold, I now know what a Googleplex is.

A dollar sign with a 180 after it.

$180? For a PDF? Wow. Um. Thanks for the free chapter.

[Update 8/2/2006]
I see lots of people who hit this post after searching on "What is a googleplex?". To you people, I have two things to say:

1. A googol is 10 to the hundredth power:
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
A googolplex is 10 to the googolth power; I'm not going to write that number here. It's huge.
2. Don't type "what is a" into Google. It doesn't help your search. Just type "googleplex".
at

1 comment:

  1. JeffW8:09 AM

    It's hard to think about, let alone really know, this kind of stuff in concrete terms. To make these numbers a bit more understandable, here are some landmarks in that space:

    10^22 - # of grains of sand on earth
    10^50 - # of atoms in the earth
    10^57 - # of atoms in the Sun
    10^69 - # of atoms in Milky Way
    10^81 - # of atoms in the Universe

    So, relative to these landmarks on the number line, a google is WAY bigger. A googleplex is downright silly.

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