What the heck is “googol” and how did it contribute to the birth of “Google”? Watch to find out 🙂 #STEMvee
Transcript: Sometimes when we want to express a really large number in an exaggerated way, we tend to use fictitious words like “bajillion” or “umpteen.” Sometimes we use “googol.” Wait, what? Is it a fictitious word or a real word? As absurd as it looks, it is actually a real word! Edward Kasner, a famous American mathematician, wanted to have a word to describe a number that is so large that you would get tired of writing it, which is 10 to the 100th power. That’s 1 plus 100 zeros! 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 So, Edward asked his nine year old nephew, Milton Sirotta, to come up with a word and he suggested “googol”. Kaser adopted it so 10 to the 100th power = “googol.” He further extended the word to the larger “googolplex” to define 1 followed by a googol of zeros! Written as 1 times 10 to the 10th power to the 100th power. A googol is such a large number that our minds can’t even comprehend it, and because it’s so large it doesn’t have a particularly important role in mathematics. It’s even estimated that there are only 4 times 10 to the 79th power atoms in the universe, which is less than a googol. This means there isn’t a googol of anything on the Earth, not grains of sand, not drops of water in the oceans, etc. So, how does googol relate to Google, the famous search engine? The answer is… someone didn’t spell check! Back sometime in the late 1990s, Larry Page and Sergey Brin were two graduate students at Stanford. They had been working on a search engine and had given it the name, BackRub. Fortunately, they realize that BackRub is not the greatest name for a tech company… So, they needed to find something more fitting and Sean Anderson, another graduate student, suggested googolplex. Larry liked the smaller word, googol and felt like the word was a great fit for what they were trying to do: index an unfathomable number of Internet web pages. Sean, not realizing googol was spelled with an ol at the end, searched the Internet to see if the domain google.com was available. Larry ended up liking the new word Sean had accidentally come up with, and voila! Google was born!
