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The Politics of Large Numbers:A History of Statistical Reasoning is a book by French statistician, sociologist and historian of science, Alain Desrosières, which was originally published in French in 1993. [1] The English translation, by Camille Naish, was published in 1998 by Harvard University Press. [2]
Names of larger numbers, however, have a tenuous, artificial existence, rarely found outside definitions, lists, and discussions of how large numbers are named. Even well-established names like sextillion are rarely used, since in the context of science, including astronomy, where such large numbers often occur, they are nearly always written ...
Empty numbers are sometimes made up, with obvious meaning: "squillions" is obviously an empty, but very large, number; a "squintillionth" would be a very small number. Some empty numbers may be modified by actual numbers, such as "four zillion", and are used for jest, exaggeration, or to relate abstractly to actual numbers.
Large numbers, far beyond those encountered in everyday life—such as simple counting or financial transactions—play a crucial role in various domains.These expansive quantities appear prominently in mathematics, cosmology, cryptography, and statistical mechanics.
Far larger finite numbers than any of these occur in modern mathematics. For instance, Graham's number is too large to reasonably express using exponentiation or even tetration. For more about modern usage for large numbers, see Large numbers. To handle these numbers, new notations are created and used. There is a large community of ...
They are called the strong law of large numbers and the weak law of large numbers. [ 16 ] [ 1 ] Stated for the case where X 1 , X 2 , ... is an infinite sequence of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Lebesgue integrable random variables with expected value E( X 1 ) = E( X 2 ) = ... = μ , both versions of the law state that the ...
The law of truly large numbers (a statistical adage), attributed to Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller, states that with a large enough number of independent samples, any highly implausible (i.e. unlikely in any single sample, but with constant probability strictly greater than 0 in any sample) result is likely to be observed. [1]
In Hebrew and other Middle Eastern traditions, the number 40 is used to express a large but unspecific number, [24] [22] as in the Hebrew Bible's "forty days and forty nights", Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste. [25] [26] This usage is sometimes found in English as well (for example, "forty winks"). [27] [28]