Anyone on the Internet has heard of Google, the giant search engine plus more company started in 1997 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The story is how they came to choose this name for their soon-to-be-behemoth enterprise. And that story really is about Googols.

A Googol is the name of the mathematical number represented by 10¹⁰⁰. Googol got its name when the American mathematician Edward Kasner was searching for a way to interest young people in math and so asked his nine year old nephew to name this very large number, which is essentially a 1 followed by 100 zeros. He introduced this term to the world in a book he co-wrote titled Mathematics and the Imagination.

Larry and Sergey, being mathematicians, were aware of this term and, wanting a name for their company which would sum up its envisioned scope, decided upon Googol. However, mathematicians are not necessarily also good spellers and so when it came time to register the name, the name "Google" was born.

There is a further chapter to this story, and is the story of the Googolplex. A Googolplex is the number 10^googol, or 10 to the tenth power to the 100th power. Written out, it is 1 followed by 10¹⁰⁰ zeroes, that is, a 1 followed by a googol zeroes. While we can write out a googol easily enough (1 followed by 100 zeros), tackling a googolplex is not so easily done. According to Wikipedia, if a person wrote two digits per second, then writing a googolplex would take about 1.51×10⁹² years, which is about 1.1×10⁸² times the accepted age of the universe.

So, that is a Googolplex. A Googleplex, on the other hand, is the name of the corporate headquarters complex of Google. There is a number even bigger than a Googolplex and that is Graham's number, which is so big, by all accounts, that the Universe does not contain enough stuff on which to write it out. But that's a story for another day. Maybe even for our next newsletter. Check back with us and find out.