Insanely Ridiculously Absurdly Large Numbers

One of the first mathematical concepts that most of us grasp when we're children is that there's no such thing as the biggest number. No matter what number you pick, you can always add one to it. Now, you might think that such a simple idea wouldn't have any profound impact in mathematics, yet it does. In fact, mathematicians have come up with numbers so mind bogglingly large that it's difficult to even grasp their size, and new forms of notation had to be developed to even write them down. Learn more about insanely ridiculously absurdly large numbers on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Carvana is so easy. Just a click, and we've got ourselves a car. See? So many cars. That's a clicktastic inventory. And check out the financing options. Payments to fit our budget. I mean, that's Clickonomics one zero one. Delivery to our door. Just a hop, skip, and a click away. And bought. No better feeling than when everything just clicks. Buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply. Overwhelmed by investing? If you're anything like us, the hardest part is getting started. That's why we created the investing for beginners podcast. Our goal is to help simplify money so it can work for you. We invite guests to demystify investing. At least, like, the minimum 10% into the 04/2001 k. I'm Dave Ahern. And I'm Andrew Sather. And we hope you join us on the Investing for Beginners podcast. On the Investing for Beginners podcast. Let me start by saying that this episode is not about infinity. I've previously done an episode on infinity and how it's handled by mathematics. This episode will be about finite numbers. Absurdly large finite numbers, but finite numbers nonetheless. And I'll start by noting that society's need for large numbers has changed as civilization has evolved. Some small scale or historically isolated societies didn't develop words for numbers beyond two or three because their daily lives didn't require exact counting beyond that. Instead of precise numbers, they often used qualitative terms such as one, two, and then many. And this wasn't a limitation of intelligence, but a reflection of practical needs. When activities like hunting, gathering, or sharing resources rarely depend on exact large quantities, there was little pressure to create or maintain a full counting system. But as we progressed, we needed to worry about things like money. Even in the ancient world, the idea of a million people or a million pieces of silver was not unheard of. You might remember a time when a billion dollars was an astronomical amount of money. Today, there are companies with valuations over a trillion dollars, and The US national debt is approaching $40,000,000,000,000. As the scale of both the atom and the universe came to be understood, scientific progress necessitated the use of increasingly large numbers. One of the first problems we had was how to express large numbers in writing. If you just write out …