A googol (gogol in French... and sometimes googol too!) is famously enormous. It is 1 followed by 100 zeros, 10100 .
In French, since 10100 = 10,000 × 10 6 × 16, a googol is called dix mille sexdécillions. This unusual name first appeared in a 1938 book, Mathematics and the Imagination, by the mathematician Edward Kasner. Written for a general audience, the book describes some simple properties of infinity. Kasner notes, for example, that the number of raindrops falling during a storm over New York is "very large" but "very small compared with infinity". It is at this point that he defines a googol. He immediately stresses that the name has nothing to do with the Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol.
The word "googol" was suggested to him by his nine-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta, whom he had asked for a word containing "lots of O's" to name this large number, written with so many zeros. The term itself was popular at the time. A famous comic-strip character bore this onomatopoeic surname: Barney Google, created in 1919. His adventures appeared in numerous newspapers. In the ultimate irony, given what happened next, Kasner decided to change google to googol so that he would not be accused of plagiarism.
A whimsical popularizer
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Edward Kasner was an American mathematician. Time magazine described him as a "distinguished and whimsical researcher". He worked on geometric problems connected with the physical sciences. A relativistic metric bears his name.
