How high can you count on your fingers? (Spoiler: much higher than 10) - James Tanton
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How high can you count on your fingers? It seems like a question with an obvious answer. After all, most of us have ten fingers -- or to be more precise, eight fingers and two thumbs. This gives us a total of ten digits on our two hands, which we use to count to ten. But is that really as high as we can go? James Tanton investigates.
In our place-value system, each of the numbers 10, 100, 1000, 10000, …. uses the same two symbols, yet the sizes of the numbers represented grow ten-fold in value. In 1938, Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, coined the term “googol” for the number 1 followed by one hundred zeros, and the term “googolplex” for the number 1 followed by a googol zeros. Is the estimated number of atoms in the observable universe smaller or larger than a googolplex?
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Meet The Creators
- Educator James Tanton
- Director Lisa LaBracio
- Script Editor Alex Gendler
- Sound Designer Weston Fonger
- Animator Kaitlyn Carroll
- Narrator Addison Anderson
