What is the biggest number? Biggest numbers scientists, physicists and mathematicians have had to define
Just how big is a billion? It can be hard to conceptualize.
At a rate of one per second, it would take over 30 years (with no breaks for food or sleep) to count to a billion.
A dollar bill is 6.14 inches long, according to the U.S. Currency Education Program. You can probably picture 100 one-dollar bills lined up end to end. The line would stretch just over 51 feet.
Lining up a billion one-dollar bills, though, is nearly impossible to imagine. The bills would stretch over 96,900 miles — almost far enough to wrap around the Earth’s equator four times.
But a billion doesn’t even approach the infinite range of numbers.
What is the biggest number?
Think of the largest number you can. Now double it. Now double that, too. Spoiler: That number can also be doubled, tripled, multiplied by 10, squared, cubed and more — and it will only keep getting bigger.
It’s clear, then, that there is no real answer to this question.
We will never run out of numbers, but here are some of the biggest numbers scientists, physicists and mathematicians have come across and had to name:
Avogadro’s number: This number, most easily expressed as 6.022 x 1023, represents the number of particles in a scientific unit known as a mole, according to Scientific American.
Eddington number: The Eddington number in physics (not to be confused with the Eddington number in cycling) is 136 x 2256, which is approximately 1.575 x 1079, according to Wolfram Mathworld. This number was Eddington’s guess for the number of protons in the observable universe.
Googol: A googol is most easily expressed as 10100. That means it is a one followed by one hundred zeros. The number was referenced by Edward Kasner in his 1940 book, Mathematics and the Imagination, according to Live Science. Kasner credits his nine-year-old nephew for giving the value its name. Decades later, Larry Page and Sergey Brin decided to name their search engine after the number — though a student working for them typed the name wrong, according to Live Science. Today, we have Google as a result.
How old is Google? History of the world's most popular search engine.
Googolplex: A googolplex is 10 raised to the power of a googol. According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, it can be expressed as 10googol or 1010100.
Graham’s Number: Graham’s number, named after Ronald Graham, is an extremely large, finite number. According to Plus Magazine, this number is so large that the universe is not large enough to express all of its digits — though we do know it ends in a 7 and is divisible by 3. Even power towers of the form (taking a number to one power, then to another, then to another) cannot express Graham’s number, according to Brilliant.
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