Big Numbers

ZERO
BILLIONS
INFINITY
FRACTIONS
DECIMALS
EXPONENTS
LOGARITHMS

HISTORY OF NUMBERS
MATH HOME PAGE
KIDIPEDE HOME PAGE

A 1 with one zero next to it means 1 multiplied by 10, or ten. A 1 with two zeros next to it means 1 x 100, or in exponents 10², or a hundred. A 1 with three zeros next to it means 1 x 1000, or 10³, or a thousand. Ten is ten times bigger than one, and a hundred is ten times bigger than ten, and a thousand is ten times bigger than a hundred.

For larger numbers, the sequence goes like this:

10,000 = 10⁴ = ten thousand
100,000 = 10⁵ = a hundred thousand
1,000,000 = 10⁶ = a million
10,000,000 = 10⁷ = ten million
100,000,000 = 10⁸ = a hundred million
1,000,000,000 = 10⁹ = a billion
1,000,000,000,000 = 10¹² = a trillion
1,000,000,000,000,000 = 10¹⁵ = a quadrillion

The biggest numbers anyone has named are a googol, which is one with a hundred zeros after it (10¹⁰⁰) and a googolplex, which is one with a googol zeros after it (10^googol). A googol is so big that it is more than the number of atoms in the universe as far as we can see with telescopes (about 10⁸⁰). A googolplex would be a lot more than that - there's no real number of things that comes anywhere near a googolplex. But those aren't the biggest possible numbers, because you could always say, "a googolplex plus one, a googolplex plus two," and so on. Numbers are infinite, so you never come to the end of them.