Why names of numbers larger than a quadrillion are almost never used?
1. There are occasionally ambiguities, but they aren’t as common any more (see wikipedia). The second poster is entirely incorrect here. 2. Scientific notation is more compact – write out one quattuordecillion vs. 10^45 3. Scientific notation doesn’t require looking up the name in a table to actually use it for anything useful like calculations 4. Very few reasons come up to actually use these huge numbers. Once you get into things like computational complexity that actually require numbers this large, they’re not nicely written in terms of quadrillions or whatever, so other notation is used. Edit: Oh, and there are different systems for representing huge things. You don’t say a billion bytes, you say a gigabyte. SI prefixes are different from silly flat number notation. You ever heard the term “a quadrillion-flop”? No, you haven’t. You ever heard the term petaflop? If you deal with supercomputers, you have, and you conceivably could in the future. You hear prefixes that mean huge numb
