Huge Numbers

How humanity’s long pursuit of ever-larger numbers broke the boundaries of mathematics and propelled us into the Information Age
What if, every time you wanted to write down 1,000,000, you had to d ...

How humanity’s long pursuit of ever-larger numbers broke the boundaries of mathematics and propelled us into the Information Age
What if, every time you wanted to write down 1,000,000, you had to draw a picture of a god? And what if that number were the biggest you had a symbol for? If you were doing math in ancient Egypt, those were the rules: anything bigger broke math.
As mathematician Richard Elwes shows in Huge Numbers, this is the strange story of math. Even today, writing down some numbers is beyond us: try it with all the zeroes in a googolplex, or an outrageous alien num