What is the biggest known number to man?

Answer 1

3/0

Answer 2

Yikes!That's a big number
That's an interesting question. The strictly correct answer is: there is NO biggest number in the world. Whatever number you think of, however big, I can add one to it (or 2 or 10, or whatever I want) and get a bigger number. If you think that one is then the biggest, just add one again, and you get a bigger one! We say that the numbers are INFINITE - this means that they `go on for ever', and you can never reach the end, however far you count. The opposite of infinite is FINITE - this means that you can count how many you have and the counting process will stop. For example, the number of hands I have is finite since I can count up to 2 and then I can stop counting.

However, a more interesting question is: what is the biggest USEFUL number that has been found?

What do I mean by `useful'?

Possible answers to this question are: the number of something in the universe. For example, there estimated to be about 1080 particles (very small bits of matter) in the universe. That means 1 followed by 80 zeros - a VERY big number! (Please tell me if you don't know what powers are.)

But this number really isn't all that big. What about the number 101080 - this is 1, followed by 1080 zeros. This really is unbelievably big.

The biggest known prime number (again, tell me if you don't know what a prime number is), is 22976221 - 1. This is also pretty big, but very much smaller than the last number I wrote down.

The biggest number you can write with 3 digits is 999 (write this as a tower of 9's and it doesn't use any symbols). If you know about logarithms, they are a good way of working out how big all these numbers are relative to each other.

An even bigger number is one called "Skewes' number". It turns up in a theorem (an important result) that somebody proved this century, which has to do with how many prime numbers there are below a certain number. It is 10101034. This is VERY MUCH BIGGER than that very big number I wrote down before! And yet it comes into the proof as the biggest number below which something must happen. (In fact, an approximation changes from being below the right answer to above the right answer, or maybe it's the other way round, I don't quite remember.)

There is also a number called Graham's number which is ridiculously huge.

If you want to find out more about very big numbers, and lots of other numbers, there is a very good book called `The Penguin Book of Curious and Interesting Numbers'. It has lots of information about lots of different numbers, including the ones above (although you won't find out about the prime I told you about, because that was discovered very recently, over the Internet in fact. See the web-site http://pass.maths.org.uk/issue3/news/prime.html.

I hope you've found this interesting and useful!


Two larger primes than the one mentioned above have been discovered, and I'm sure there are more to come. The following link should give you up-to-date information:
The Largest Known Primes

Answer 3

I was going to say "infinity" though it isn't a number in numerical form... but then I saw the answer that said "9". I suppose in a way that's also true. Every number is made up of a combination of the digits 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9... and of those 9 would be the largest number. It's an interesting question, do you rank the number based on its parts or the whole? Ah the mathematical conundrum... :)

Answer 4

Googolplex is the highest named number, but I think for general purposes, not scientific. Scientists use "scientific notation." For example, 10²³ is ten to the 23rd power. Rather than writing out 10 followed by 23 zeroes, this is faster, more convenient. It can get bigger, more complex. For example, 10²³ x 9000 is 10 to the 23rd times 9,000. And it gets yet more complex.

Here's a list in use for the United States:

million

billion

trillion

quadrillion

quintillion

sextillion

septillion

octillion

nonillion

decillion

undecillion

duodecillion

tredecillion

quattuordecillion

quindecillion

sexdecillion

septendecillion

octodecillion

novemdecillion

vigintillion

unvigintillion

duovigintillion

trevigintillion

quattuorvigintillion

quinvigintillion

sexvigintillion

septenvigintillion

octovigintillion

novemvigintillion

trigintillion

untrigintillion

duotrigintillion


A centillion is a 1 followed by 303 zeroes

A googol a 1 followed by 100 zeroes, and a googolplex is a 1 followed by a googol of zeroes. But the google is not usually used in science at all. More for fun and general expressions.
The names googol and googolplex were invented by Edward Kasner's nephew, Milton Sirotta, and introduced in Kasner and Newman's 1940 book, Mathematics and the Imagination, in the following passage:

Words of wisdom are spoken by children at least as often as by scientists. The name "googol" was invented by a child (Dr. Kasner's nine-year-old nephew) who was asked to think up a name for a very big number, namely 1 with a hundred zeroes after it.

Answer 5

9

Answer 6

This reminds me of this quote from the book "The Phantom Tollbooth" by Norton Juster:

A mathematician asks Milo, a little boy, “What’s the greatest number you can think of?”

“Nine trillion, nine hundred ninety-nine billion, nine hundred
ninety-nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine,” replied Milo breathlessly.

“Very good,” said the Mathemagician. “Now add one to it. Now add one again,” he repeated when Milo had added the previous one. “Now add one again. Now add one again. Now add one again. Now add one again. Now add one again. Now add one again. Now add —”

“But when can I stop?” pleaded Milo.

“Never,” said the Mathemagician with a little smile, “for the number
you want is always at least one more than the number you’ve got, and it’s so large that if you started saying it yesterday you wouldn’t
finish tomorrow.”

In other words, the answer to your question is infinity! That said, there an interesting twist is what the biggest number is that we can comprehend. For example, we can usually understand what it would mean to have $1,000,000, because we can compare it to what we have now, imagine things we could buy with it, etc.

However, what about how many people die in a terrible accident? Some psychologists believe that in events like the Holocaust, we can simply not comprehend the meaning of 6 million people being slaughtered - we can only really understand the scale of 200 people dying or so.

Basically, the limit to the biggest number is also the limit to the human mind's ability to think of it. And so far, we haven't stopped!

Best of luck & happy counting!

Answer 7

the number 9 all numbers above that are made up of of numbers 0 to 9

Answer 8

9/11

Answer 9

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Answer 10

There isn't one, unless you want to consider infinity a quantifiable constant. Which it both technically is and isn't.

Otherwise, in practical terms, a "googol" has one hundred "0"s after it.

A Rubik's cube has over 4 quintillion (4,000,000,000,000,000) combinations.