Showing posts with label marmot. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marmot. Show all posts

Monday, August 10, 2009

A google or a googol


Were you aware that the company "Google" gets its name as derived from the term "googol" which is a name for the number 1 with a hundred zeroes following it. It was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner, when he was 9 years old.
Its kind of funny, because the company Google uses the name to kind of show how vast the search engine is, but Kasner used the original term to contrast an unimaginably large number to infinity. The number is still quantifiable, whereas infinity is still infinity.