what is the largest number?

Question

what is the largest number that is named? And where can I find the information to show all the named numbers such as million, billion, trillion...

Answer 1

Googolplex is the number 1010100.

It can also be written as 10googol, or

10 to the 100 th power

Googolplex
[edit] Etymology of the Word
In about 1920, Edward Kasner's nine-year-old nephew Milton Sirotta coined the term "googol"; Milton then proposed the further term "googolplex" to be "one, followed by writing zeroes until you got tired." Kasner decided to adopt a more formal definition "because different people get tired at different times and it would never do to have Carnera [a champion boxer] a better mathematician than Dr. Einstein, simply because he had more endurance."[1]


[edit] How big is a googolplex?
One googol is greater than the number of elementary particles in the known universe, which has been variously estimated from 1079 up to 1081. Since a googolplex is one followed by a googol zeroes, it would not be possible to write down or store a googolplex in decimal notation, even if all the matter in the known universe were converted into paper and ink or disk drives.

Thinking of this another way, consider printing the digits of a googolplex in unreadable, 1-point font. TeX 1pt font is .3514598mm per digit, which means it would take about meters to write in one point font. The known universe is estimated at meters in diameter, which means the distance to write the digits would be about times the diameter of the known universe. The time it would take to write such a number also renders the task implausible: if a person can write two digits per second, it would take around times the age of the universe to write down a googolplex.

Thus in the physical world it is difficult to give examples of numbers that compare closely to a googolplex. In analyzing quantum states and black holes, physicist Don Page writes that "determining experimentally whether or not information is lost down black holes of solar mass ... would require more than measurements to give a rough determination of the final density matrix after black hole evaporates."[1] In a separate article, Page shows that the number of states in a black hole with a mass roughly equivalent to the Andromeda Galaxy is in the range of a googolplex.[2]

In pure mathematics, the magnitude of a googolplex is not as large as some of the specially defined extraordinarily large numbers, such as those written with tetration, Knuth's up-arrow notation, Steinhaus-Moser notation, or Conway chained arrow notation. Even more simply, one can name numbers larger than a googolplex with fewer symbols, for example,

,
is much larger. This last number can be expressed more concisely as using tetration, or using Knuth's up-arrow notation.

Some sequences grow very quickly; for instance, the first two Ackermann numbers are 1=1 and 22=4, but then the third is =7,625,597,484,987, a power tower of threes more than seven trillion high. Yet, much larger still is Graham's number, perhaps the largest natural number mathematicians actually have a use for.

A googolplex is a huge number that can be expressed compactly because of nested exponentiation. Other procedures (like tetration) can express large numbers even more compactly. The natural question is: what procedure uses the smallest number of symbols to express the biggest number? A Turing machine formalizes the notion of a procedure, and a busy beaver is the Turing machine of size n that can write down the biggest possible number [3]. The bigger n is, the more complex the busy beaver, hence the bigger the number it can write down. For n=1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 the numbers expressible are not huge, but research as of 2006 shows that for n=6 the busy beaver can write down a number at least as big as .[4] It is an open question whether the seventh busy beaver can express a googolplex

Answer 2

There is no such thing as a "largest number". Numbers will go on forever and ever; non stop. Infinity might sound like the largest number, but it just means never ending, or roofless

Answer 3

The largest known number is called a googleplex, which is a 1 followed by googol zeroes, or

10^100.

Check this site out.
http://www.math.utoronto.ca/mathnet/questionCorner/largestnumber.html

Answer 4

The largest named number is googolplex, which is 1 with 10^100 zeros behind it.
infinity is not a number

Answer 5

The largest number is 1/x as x approaches 0. Also known as infinity.

You can get information at the US government website. For example: http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html

Answer 6

The largest number anyone has used in a mathematical proof is Graham's number. It is so large it can't be written in scientific notation.

Answer 7

"googolplex" is the largest named number. It is equivalent to 10^10^100.

(Don't confuse this with a 'googol', which is 10^100)

Answer 8

What is a name? This question is not one that has an answer, because anybody can name anything. Perhaps your teacher thinks this is a good question, and you can certainly look for names of large numbers, and maybe you will beat everybody in your class, and maybe that is a profitable use of your time, but you have to decide. My suggestion is to use google.

Answer 9

Graham's number ... or even better... pi without the decimal point :P or 9↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑9

Answer 10

the largest number is call googolplex
you can learn more about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googolplex