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.
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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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