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Billion is a word for a large number, and it has two distinct definitions: 1,000,000,000, i.e. one thousand million, or 10 9 (ten to the ninth power), as defined on the short scale. This is now the most common sense of the word in all varieties of English; it has long been established in American English and has since become common in Britain ...
A standardized way of writing very large numbers allows them to be easily sorted in increasing order, and one can get a good idea of how much larger a number is than another one. To compare numbers in scientific notation, say 5×10 4 and 2×10 5, compare the exponents first, in this case 5 > 4, so 2×10 5 > 5×10 4.
The term was coined by 9-year-old Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. It was popularized in Kasner's 1940 book Mathematics and the Imagination, where it was used to compare and illustrate very large numbers. Googolplex, a much larger power of ten (10 to the googol power, or 10 10 100), was also introduced in that book.
In some short scale countries, milliard was defined to 10 9 and billion dropped altogether, with trillion redefined down to 10 12 and so on for the larger numbers. [5] In many short scale countries, milliard was dropped altogether and billion was redefined down to 10 9, adjusting downwards the value of trillion and all the larger numbers. Timeline
Extensions of the standard dictionary numbers. This section illustrates several systems for naming large numbers, and shows how they can be extended past vigintillion. Traditional British usage assigned new names for each power of one million (the long scale): 1,000,000 = 1 million; 1,000,0002 = 1 billion; 1,000,0003 = 1 trillion; and so on.
A googol is the large number 10 100 or ten to the power of one hundred. In decimal notation, it is written as the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeroes: 10, 000, 000 ...
A typical book can be printed with 10 6 zeros (around 400 pages with 50 lines per page and 50 zeros per line). Therefore, it requires 10 94 such books to print all the zeros of a googolplex (that is, printing a googol zeros).
Skewes's number is much larger, but it is now known that there is a crossing between ... zeros used by 2000: 1.39822 ...