Friday, April 4, 2014

Interesting fact about where the name Google came from

GOOGOL
1.0 × 10100
A googol is a 1 with 100 zeros after it. A googolplex is a 1 with a googol zeros after it.
 
A googol is the large number 10100; that is, the digit 1 followed by 100 zeroes:
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
The term was coined in 1938 by 9-year-old Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. Kasner popularized the concept in his 1940 book Mathematics and the Imagination.

Sean [Anderson] and Larry [Page] were in their office, trying to think up a good name — something that related to the indexing of an immense amount of data. Sean verbally suggested the word “googolplex,” and Larry responded verbally with the shortened form, “googol.” Sean was seated at his computer terminal, so he executed a search of the Internet domain name registry database to see if the newly suggested name was still available for registration and use. Sean is not an infallible speller, and he made the mistake of searching for the name spelled as “google.com,” which he found to be available.

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