Googol

Googol is a well-known large number, equal to 10100 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, in the American system, is equal to ten duotrigintillion, or ten sexdecilliard in the French/German system. Googol can be expressed as {10,100} in BEAF or E100#1 in Hyper-E Notation.

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

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.

Size
There are a mere \(10^{80}\) elementary particles in the, so googol has little use when measuring real-world quantities. However. it is still less than the number of Planck volumes in the universe, or about \(10^{183}\), so it still has some real-world meaning. Sbiis Saibian showed that a googol particles in a tightly packed sphere would still have a diameter of 5.6 quadrillion meters, or half a light-year.

A cube with edge length 35mm contains about a googol Planck volumes.

Googol is comparable to some numbers produced by. For example, 70 factorial (the number of ways 70 distinct objects can be arranged in a row) is about 20% larger than \(10^{100}\).

A googol seconds is about a sexvigintillion \(10^{81}\) times the estimated age of the universe. A googol angstroms is approximately 100 trevigintillion light-years.

It takes approximately 317 novemvigintillion years to count to googol.