Googol

Googol is a large number, equal to $$10^{100}$$ or 1 followed by 100 zeroes. It was coined by Edward Kasner's nine-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta. The name appears to have no particular meaning.

The googol's decimal expansion is shown below.


 * 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

The googol, in the American system, is equal to ten duotrigintillion, or ten sexdecilliard in the French/German system.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of the Google search engine, named their company after a pun on googol, as their goal is to cache the mass of data that makes up the World Wide Web.

The definition of googol, googolplex, and similar numbers eventually branched into the field googology, the study and nomenclature of large numbers.