The phrase "large number" has a subjective meaning, which is unsatisfactory for googologists because their studies rely on the definition of the term. Informally, it could be defined as "a number larger than any one used in everyday life." To a politician, this may be a trillion euros; to a cosmologist, 1026 meters.
Sbiis Saibian suggested defining a large number as any real number greater than 1, offering the alternate term superuniary number.[1] Small numbers would be those smaller than 1. This definition has the advantage that it makes the small numbers the reciprocals of the large ones.
Until January 2013, Googology Wiki only considered numbers at least 100 to be large numbers, and thus suitable for inclusion. Names of numbers above a trillion are rarely used in practice; such large numbers have practical usage primarily in the scientific domain, where powers of ten are expressed as 10 with a numeric superscript. However, these somewhat rare names are considered acceptable for approximate statements. For example, the statement "There are approximately 7.1 octillion atoms in an adult human body" is understood to be in short scale (and is only accurate if referring to short scale rather than long scale).
The Indian numbering system uses the named numbers common between the long and short scales up to ten thousand. For larger values, it includes named numbers at each multiple of 100; including lakh (10⁵) and crore (10⁷).
Kyodaisuu in Japanese[]
In Japanese, kyodaisuu (巨大数) means a very large number. "Kyodai" (巨大) means very large, "kazu" (数) means number, where it changes to "suu" when combined as a single word as kyodaisuu. Therefore, kyodaisuu means not just a large number, but has a connotation that it is a super-huge number.
Fish wrote[2] that the first appearance of the word 巨大数 in his knowledge is an article in 日経サイエンス magazine,[3] which is a translation of the article "The challenge of Large Numbers" in Scientific American by Richard Crandall.[4] According to Fish,[2] the word 巨大数 spread in Japanese internet community in the thread of 巨大数探索スレッド (Thread for the search of kyodaisuu) in Japanese textboard 2channel, which started in 2002. In the thread, people were creating and analyzing large numbers which exceed Graham's number, such as Fish numbers, and for expressing such large numbers, people started to use the word kyodaisuu, to express unimaginably large numbers. Therefore, the word kyodaisuu has a connotation that it is an unimaginably large number.
In Japanese googology community, 6 is considered to be kyodaisuu with the Japanese phrase "6は巨大数" (6 is a kyodaisuu), partially as a sort of a joke.[5] For a detail on the historical background, see Flan numbers#Episode.
Sources[]
- ↑ Saibian, Sbiis. Very Small Very Large Numbers. Retrieved January 2013.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Fish "巨大数論発展の軌跡 (Development of the theory of kyodaisuu)", in Japanese, 現代思想 (Contemporary philisophy) December 2019
- ↑ R.E. クランダル 超巨大数への挑戦 日経サイエンス May 1997.
- ↑ Richard E. Crandall "The Challenge of Large Numbers" Scientific American 276(2) (February 1997) pp. 74-78.
- ↑ 叢武, 6は巨大数, twitter.
See also[]
Concepts: googology · large number · eventual domination · ordinal · cardinal · recursion · infinity
Important numbers and functions: googol · googolplex · -illions · hyper operators · Graham's number · Extensible-E System · Bowers' Exploding Array Function · Bird's array notation · TREE sequence · Busy beaver function · fast-growing hierarchy · Rayo's number
People: Chris Bird · Jonathan Bowers · Harvey Friedman · Lawrence Hollom · André Joyce · Leo Moser · Robert Munafo · Sbiis Saibian · Aarex Tiaokhiao