Googol

For the past week or so, Nathan has been talking about and using the word google. Upon clarifying that he did not mean google as in Laurie Berkner's song about googleheads (which is not to be confused with a geek who loves Google search engine), I clarified that he meant a number.

Well, you know that W and I are both engineers. Engineers who should know if google is actually a number. W looked at me blankly. I reached deep into the far reaches of the canyon of my brain, a canyon that has been flooded with many other tidbits of information and has washed any semblance of intelligent bits away into a tiny crevice.

me: "I think it is a number. A number like pi or G."

W: "Really?"

And that was the end of it. Until Nathan mentioned it again this morning and said it was 100 10's.

So I googled Google only to find out it was Googol. Per Wikepedia.com:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Not to be confused with Google, the Internet company, and Nikolai Gogol, the author.

A googol is the large number 10100, that is, the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeros (in decimal representation). The term was coined in 1920 by nine-year-old Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. Kasner popularized the concept in his book Mathematics and the Imagination.
A googol is of the same order of magnitude as the factorial of 70 (70! being approximately 1.198 googol, or 10 to the power 100.0784), and its only prime factors are 2 and 5 (100 of each). In binary it would take up 333 bits.
The googol is of no particular significance in mathematics, but is useful when comparing with other incredibly large quantities such as the number of subatomic particles in the visible universe or the number of possible chess games. Kasner created it to illustrate the difference between an unimaginably large number and infinity, and in this role it is sometimes used in teaching mathematics.
Google, the Internet search engine, was named after this number. Larry Page, one of the founders, was fascinated with mathematics and Googol, even during high school. They ended up with "Google" due to a spelling mistake.[1][2]
The word "google" or "googol," regardless of spelling, suggests the wide-eyed look of a baby, and the comic strip character Barney Google who began appearing in the 1910s.
A googol can be written in conventional notation as follows:
1 googol
= 10100
= 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
Its official English number name is ten duotrigintillion on the short scale, ten thousand sexdecillion on the long scale, or ten sexdecilliard on the Peletier long scale.