What is the largest number?
Sometimes,
we talk about what the biggest number is and then arrive at the answer:
INFINITY. But, infinity is not a number in a real sense. So, the largest number
closest to infinity is ‘Graham’s number’. This number is so huge that it is
said that even the entire universe will not be enough to write on!
Graham’s number is really big, but of course, it's precisely 0% as
big as infinity. On the other hand, everything we touch is finite, so in some
sense, Graham's number is probably "close enough" to infinity for
doing most math.
Sometimes when we talk about big numbers, we talk about how many digits
they have or, basically equivalently, write them in scientific notation
involving some power of 10. A googol, for example, is 10^100, which has 101
digits. The largest known prime number has over 17 million digits. But, Graham’s
number is ridiculously larger than googol or googolplex. It is so huge that it
cannot even be mentioned in scientific notation of raise to the power of 10.
The only way to
describe Graham's number involves some dense "up-arrow" notation. Up-arrow notation is an
extension of exponentiation. In the same way that exponentiation is iterated
multiplication (and is denoted by one up-arrow), two up-arrows denotes iterated
exponentiation, three up-arrows denotes iterated iterated exponentiation, and
so on.
More
concretely, a↑b is the usual exponential notation, ab=a×a×a.., for a total of b copies of a multiplied
together. Adding a second arrow, so we have a↑↑b, means we take b copies of a in a tower
of exponentials. The Wikipedia page on the
notation is a good resource if you'd like to read more.
We can describe Graham's number with an enormous stack of these
up-arrows.
We start at the bottom with g1=3↑↑↑↑3 and then creating the second row (call it g2) by having two threes separated by g1 up-arrows. Then g3 is two threes separated by g2up-arrows, and so on, until “g64” is Graham's number.
Here, we can’t even describe how large g1 number is! It blows
up the brain. The final number is totally beyond
comprehension.
Apps on play store:
Quizyfact
Weather Time
Apps on play store:
Quizyfact
Weather Time