Quote:
Originally Posted by Maksutov
It originated as a misspelling of the word "googol", which, as a googolplex, is a large number, 10E10E100 IIRC. The term "googol" was the coinage of a mathematician's very young relative.
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Our beloved Google got it's name from Googol, which is a math term.
A googol is the large number 10 power of 100, that is, the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. The term was coined in 1938 by nine-year-old Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. Kasner announced the concept in his book Mathematics and the Imagination. The Internet search engine, Google, was named as a play on the number googol.
A googol is "approximately" equal to the factorial of 70, and its only prime factors are 2 and 5. In binary it would take up 333 bits.
The googol is of no particular significance in mathematics, nor does it have any practical uses. Kasner created it to illustrate the difference between an unimaginably large number and infinity, and in this role it is sometimes used in mathematics teaching.
A googol can be written in conventional notation, as follows:
1 googol = 10100 = 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
It is equal to ten duotrigintillion and a hundredth of a tretrigintillion.