If you’ve ever been asked what is the biggest number, you may well have decided to be tricky and declare, “Infinity!”
The problem with using infinity as an answer is that it is more of a concept than anything else. Anyway, how much is infinity-plus-one, an even bigger number?
The biggest number simplified…
No, what we’re looking for here as an answer is a number that is a whole number that has been officially named and recognised as such.
The biggest number is a googol. It is written as the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeroes: 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 has no real application for everyday use, other than to compare very large quantities such as the number of subatomic particles in the visible universe or the number of hypothetical possibilities in a chess game. That said, it is culturally and socially regarded as the big daddy of numbers, especially in pub trivia around the globe.
Did you know? The term googol was coined in 1920 by 9-year-old Milton Sirotta (1911–1981), nephew of U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner. I guess googol is a lot easier to say than ten duotrigintillion.