What is a Googol?
A googol is a huge quantity, 10 to the hundredth power (10100, or 1 followed by 100 zeros. The number was invented by Edward Kasner, an American mathematician, who popularized the number in his 1940 book, Mathematics and the Imagination. Though the googol was not popularized until 1940, the term was originally coined in 1920, by Kasner’s 9-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta. At the same time, he also came up with the idea of a googolplex, which is one followed by a googol zeros. The word googol has today been overshadowed by the household word Google, based on the search engine, whose name originated with a misspelling of googol. Like the even larger number googolplex, Google’s headquarters in Mountain View is known as the Googleplex. Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, was fascinated by mathematics throughout life, and decided to name the company after the number. When it was originally made up, a googol was the largest known number at the time. Today, there are numerous larger nu
Sounds like some strange animal or a creature from outer space, doesn’t it? But it’s neither of them. A googol is a number, a very large number. You are probably familiar with numbers such as: 1 + 6 zeroes = 1,000,000 — one million 1 + 9 zeroes = 1,000,000,000 — one billion 1 + 12 zeroes = 1,000,000,000,000 — one trillion 1 + 15
