The biggest number
What’s the very biggest number there is?
Is it a million? That’s one followed by six zeros—1,000,000.
No, one million isn’t the biggest number. There can be many millions.
For example, the earth is about 93 million miles (150 million
kilometers) from the sun. So there can be numbers that are in the
hundreds of millions, the thousands of millions, and even in the
millions of millions. The number one million millions is written like
this: 1P0Q00Q00Q000
But even a million millions isn’t the biggest number. There’s a much
bigger number that is
a one with one hundred zeros after it. This number is called a googol.
It got that name because a man who worked with numbers once asked a
nine-year-old boy to give a name to a number with one hundred zeros, and
the boy said, “Call it a googol!”
Is a googol the biggest number? No, because you could always square a
googol, couldn’t you? Then you would have a number followed by two
hundred zeros. For that matter, you can have a number followed by a
thousand zeros, a million zeros, or a million million zeros.
The fact is, there is no biggest number. For, if you take the very
biggest number you can imagine, all you have to do is add one to it to
make it bigger. Then, you can add another one to make it bigger still.
And you could go right on adding ones forever and forever because
numbers are infinite (IHN fuh niht). Infinite means without any end.
