What Is The Highest Number?
Introduction
Have you been wondering how far numbers go? Do you think that some numbers are just too big to count? It’s a good question to contemplate, but there is actually an answer to this interesting riddle. Every number has a ceiling, and the highest number that exists is a number known as googol.
What Is Googol?
Googol is a number that holds the title of being the highest number currently known. It is represented as the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. It’s such a big number that it’s hard for us to even understand its enormity, but put simply, it’s a 1 with a hundred zeroes after it.
Googol was first coined in the world of mathematical terminology by 9-year-old Milton Sirotta back in the 1920’s. His interesting invention of the word got the attention of his mathematician uncle, who coined the term googolplex. A googolplex is simply a 1 followed by a googol (1 followed by 100 zeros) amount of zeroes. For example, if a googol is written out, it would look something like this:
10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Due to the sheer size of a googolplex, it’s quite impossible for humans to actually write out a googolplex because it’s such a huge number. The number is so big that it’s impossible for us to wrap our heads around it.
What Are Other Bigger Numbers?
Beyond the staggering googolplex, there are some other outrageously large numbers that are interesting to consider. One example is a number called a googolplexian, or a 1 followed by a googolplex amount of zeroes. It’s almost beyond human comprehension, but it exists.
There are some other very long numbers out there too, like the Rayo number, which is the number of particles in the universe and is represented as a 1 followed by a 1 with a 1 following it, forty-five times.
The conclusion
So after some heavy consideration, it appears that the highest number known is googol. It’s such an incredibly large number that it’s almost incomprehensible for us to grasp. But if you don’t find googol impressive enough, there are some similarly large numbers out there like the googolplexian and the Rayo number. It’s truly a fascinating concept to explore.