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googolplex

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A googolplex is the large number , that is, raised to the power of a googol. If written out in ordinary decimal notation, it would be followed by a googol (10100) ‌a physically impossible number to write explicitly .

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A googolplex is an enormously large number equal to 10 raised to the power of a googol (which itself is 10 raised to the 100th power), making it incomprehensibly vast. It's too large to ever write out in full because doing so would require more digits than there are atoms in the observable universe, which is why it mainly serves as a mathematical concept rather than a practical quantity.

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Wikidata facts

Show 4 more facts
publication date
1940-00-00
Commons category
Googolplex
name
googolplex
number of decimal digits
10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

via Wikidata · CC0

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Contents
  • History
  • Size
  • In the physical universe
  • Mod ''n''
  • See also
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A googolplex is the large number , that is, raised to the power of a googol. If written out in ordinary decimal notation, it would be followed by a googol (10100) ‌a physically impossible number to write explicitly .

==History== In 1920, Edward Kasner's nine-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta, coined the term googol, which is 10, and then proposed the further term googolplex to be "one, followed by writing zeroes until you get tired". Kasner decided to adopt a more formal definition because "different people get tired at different times and it would never do to have Carnera [be] a better mathematician than Dr. Einstein, simply because he had more endurance and could write for longer". It thus became standardized to 10(10100), which is usually written as 1010100 using the conventional interpretation for serial exponentiation.

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