Big numbers made tangible

Open the tab Big numbers (key 4) or the template What is a googol?.

Enter a number

Any number accepts digits (with or without separators), words such as 8 billion, scientific notation (6.02e23, 3 × 10^8), powers (2^64), factorials (52!) and the names googol and googolplex. The example buttons below fill in a few classics.

At the top you see the number In scientific notation. The facts list adds:

• Digits — how many digits it has;
• Short scale (US, UK) — the English name as used today, for example ten duotrigintillion for a googol;
• Long scale (continental Europe) — the name in the scale that German, French or Spanish follow, where a billion is a million million (milliard, billiard …);
• Exact — whether every digit is known. Sizewise keeps numbers exactly up to 20,000 digits; beyond that it keeps only their size.

Show all digits opens the full number — all 68 digits of 52!, the number of ways to shuffle a deck of cards.

Make it feel real

To make it feel real has two sentences: how long counting to the number would take at the Counting speed (per second) you set, compared with the age of the universe (13.787 billion years, Planck 2018), and how high a stack of that many US banknotes would be.

The ruler drawing places your number among famous numbers on a scale of powers of ten. Nearest famous numbers lists them with their value, how your number compares and the source — for example the number of positions of a Rubik's Cube or the people on Earth.

Very large numbers

A googolplex has a googol digits — far too many to write down. Sizewise still shows it as 10^(1 × 10^100), keeps its size instead of its digits and explains that counting to it would take far longer than the universe has existed. Numbers that large have no name in either scale, so those fields stay empty.

Next steps

• Life in weeks and live counters turns time into pictures.
• The tool sizewise-big-number gives the same names and digits to scripts and assistants.