The numbers game
If 7 is lucky and 13 is unlucky, then what's a googolplex?
One is the loneliest number, according to songwriter Harry Nilsson.
Three is a magic number, according to “Schoolhouse Rock.”
Type 5663 into a calculator, turn it upside down and you get EGGS.
Who said math is boring?
Well, me. I may have said that. But then I learned some cool things about numbers, like:
Why is 7 lucky?
For as long as humans have been able to count, they’re recognized something special about the number seven.
Seven colors in the rainbow. Seven notes in a scale. Seven deadly sins. Seven dwarfs.
There are seven days in a week not because of anything in nature but because a Babylonian king in 2300 BCE decided there should be. Ancient astronomers counted seven celestial bodies visible to the naked eye (sun, moon, five planets). Seven became linked with heaven.
You really do have a better chance of rolling a seven with a pair of dice.
Many people claim seven is their favorite number, despite it being so dangerous. (What? You didn’t know that seven ate nine?)
Why is 13 unlucky?
Some people are clinically afraid of the number 13. It’s been a recognized phobia — “triskaidekaphobia” — for more than 100 years. This is why some tall buildings just skip right over having a 13th floor. In pro cycling, racers assigned the number 13 will wear it upside down.
Nobody’s sure why 13 is considered unlucky. One theory is that Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus, was the 13th person to sit at the table for the Last Supper. One thing we do know: Stay away from Camp Crystal Lake on Friday the 13th.
Is there an evil number?
Yes, but it’s not 666.
In number theory, an “evil number” is “a non-negative integer that has an even number of 1s in its binary expression.” Non-negative integers that are not evil are called “odious.” (Don’t ask me what any of that means.)
Is “google” really a number?
No, “google” is not a number — but “googol” is. How big is a googol? Very big. It’s the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. The term was coined in 1920 by the 9-year-old nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner, who went on to write about it in books.
The company Google was named after the number googol, sort of. In 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were brainstorming new names for the search engine they had invented. (The original version was called “BackRub,” so you can see why they needed a new name.) Somebody suggested “googol” — which somebody else mistyped as “google.” And so history was made.
Are there numbers bigger than googol?
But of course. The biggest number is infinity plus 1, right? Unless it’s infinity plus 2 …
Anyway, there’s a whole new field called “googology,” which is the practice of defining super-large numbers and then naming them.
Back in ancient times, there weren’t any names for big numbers because there weren’t any practical uses for big numbers. You could simply express the idea of bigness by saying something poetic like, “as many as there are stars in the sky” or “grains of sand on the beach.”
But science advanced, and eventually we needed to count a million things. And then a billion. And now, thanks to inflation, a trillion.
We still have poetic ways to express big quantities that aren’t actual numbers, like “gazillion” or “umpteen” or “whole lotta.” (OK, maybe not so poetic.)
Googology bridges these two worlds. Mathematicians are defining unimaginably large numbers and then naming them things like “Boobawamba,” “Humongulus, “Megafugagoogolplex,” “Monster-Cube” and “The Whopper.”
Who wants to be a boobawamba-aire?