Wednesday, January 05, 2022

Graham's Number


So TIL two things. First of all, that TIL is short for "Today I learned". So I learned that. And I learned that there are some numbers that are so big that they are given names. There's a Googolplex, as seen in the illustration. Wiki says that "in 1920, Edward Kasner's nine-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta, coined the term googol, which is 10 to the 100th, and then proposed the further term googolplex to be 'one, followed by writing zeroes until you get tired.'" My kind of maths!

Of course then they found even bigger numbers, as one will if you keep counting between now and infinity. There was Moser's Number. There was Skewes's Number. And then today on Only Connect someone mentioned Graham's Number, which is even bigger. Can't really get my head around that. So rather than learning what Graham's Number actually is, I have learned that there isn't enough space in the observable universe to actually write it down. I feel better about not having a big enough brain.

This also reminds me that when there is a concept that is too big to cope with 24/7, sometimes by naming it, by defining it on that level, we can keep it near us without being too overwhelmed. Then, when we feel able to look behind the name, we can have a go at relating to it on a more personal level. It could be numbers. It could be God, also.


No comments:

Post a Comment