Googolplex facts for kids
A googolplex is a super-duper big number! It's so huge that it's written as 1 followed by a googol of zeros. To understand that, you first need to know what a googol is. A googol is the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. So, a googolplex is 10 raised to the power of a googol, which looks like 1010100. It's one of the largest numbers that has a specific name.
This number is so big that you couldn't even write it down on paper, because there aren't enough atoms in the entire known universe to make up all the zeros!
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What is a Googolplex?
A googolplex is a number that is 10 to the power of a googol. This means you take the number 10 and multiply it by itself a "googol" number of times.
To give you an idea of how big that is:
- A googol is 1 followed by 100 zeros.
- A googolplex is 1 followed by a googol (10100) number of zeros.
It's a number that is much, much larger than anything we usually count or even imagine in daily life.
Who Named This Huge Number?
The name "googolplex" was created by a young boy named Milton Sirotta. He was the nephew of a famous mathematician named Edward Kasner. In 1938, Milton, who was nine years old at the time, also came up with the name "googol" for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. His uncle Edward Kasner then wrote about these numbers in his book, Mathematics and the Imagination.
Googolplex in the Real World
You might have heard of the company Google. They actually named their main office building, or headquarters, after this number! Their headquarters is called the Googleplex. This name was chosen to show that Google aims to organize a huge, almost endless amount of information on the internet.
Even Bigger Numbers
Just like a googolplex is much bigger than a googol, there are numbers even larger than a googolplex!
Googolplexplex
A googolplexplex (sometimes called a googolplexian) is an even more enormous number. It's 1 followed by a googolplex amount of zeros. So, it's 10 raised to the power of a googolplex. This can be written as 10Googolplex or 101010100. It's a number that's hard to even think about because it's so incredibly vast!
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