Philosophy and mathematics have no place together. Shame on you MIT for allowing this garbage. Loader's number would be the biggest number now. I guess MIT is turning into an art school now.
—YouTube commenter "exet"
The Big Number Duel (also called Large Number Championship or El duelo de los números grandes in Spanish) was a large number-naming contest between associate professors Agustín Rayo of MIT and Adam N. Elga of Princeton University on 26 January 2007.[1]
Elga went first, writing the number 1 on the board. Rayo wrote a string of ones on the board, and Elga turned all of the ones except the first two into factorials. Then Rayo wrote BB(10100), and they started to extend the busy beaver function. After that, they began to create their own notations.[2]
Rayo won the contest; his winning entry is known as Rayo's number. It is famously known to be one of the largest numbers, and most numbers exceeding it have been variants on his definition.
External links[]
- Profs Duke It Out in Big Number Duel
- A. Rayo, "El duelo des los números grandes", Investigación y Ciencia, No. 383, Prensa Científica, 2008.
- A. Rayo, "Optional: The Big Number Duel", On the Brink of Paradox, MIT Press, 2019