Numbers usually make sense. You count your fingers, you count the change in your pocket, maybe you even track the thousands of dollars in a savings account if it’s been a good month. But then you hit a wall. There is a point where math stops being a tool for taxes or construction and starts becoming a sort of cosmic horror. That is exactly where the googol lives.
If you’ve ever wondered how much is a googol, the short answer is 1 followed by 100 zeros.
It looks like this:
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.
In scientific notation, it’s written as $10^{100}$. It’s a clean, round number. It feels manageable when you see it on a chalkboard. But honestly? It is a total lie. Our brains aren't built to understand it. We can say the words, but we can't feel the weight.
The Nine-Year-Old Who Named a Giant
Most people assume some gray-haired mathematician in a dusty university office came up with the name. Nope. It was actually a kid.
Back in 1920, an American mathematician named Edward Kasner was trying to find a way to get children interested in the concept of infinite numbers versus really, really big finite numbers. He was walking in the Palisades of New Jersey with his two nephews, Milton and Edwin Sirotta. Kasner asked nine-year-old Milton to give the number a name. Milton blurted out "googol."
It’s just nonsense. A playground sound.
Kasner later explained the concept in his 1940 book, Mathematics and the Imagination, which he co-authored with James Newman. He wanted to show that even though a googol is unfathomably large, it is still finite. It isn't infinity. In fact, compared to infinity, a googol is basically zero. That’s the kind of logic that keeps mathematicians up at night.
Putting a Googol in Perspective (Or Trying To)
Let's try to visualize it. You can't, but let's try anyway.
Think about the Earth. It’s huge. If you filled the entire planet with fine grains of sand—from the core all the way up to the atmosphere—you would "only" have about $10^{30}$ grains. That’s nowhere near a googol. You’re not even on the map yet.
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Maybe we go bigger. Let's look at the observable universe.
Astronomers and physicists like Sir Roger Penrose or the late Stephen Hawking have estimated the total number of elementary particles (protons, neutrons, and electrons) in the visible universe. The number they usually land on is somewhere between $10^{78}$ and $10^{82}$.
Think about that for a second.
If you counted every single atom in every single star in every single galaxy we can see with our most powerful telescopes, you would still be trillions upon trillions of times short of a googol. There literally aren't enough things in existence to represent what a googol is. To reach a googol, you would need billions of universes just like ours, and you’d have to count every single atom in all of them combined.
It’s a number that exists almost entirely in the mind.
Why Google Isn't Googol
You can’t talk about this without mentioning the search engine.
When Larry Page and Sergey Brin were starting their company at Stanford, they wanted a name that suggested they were organizing an immense amount of data. They settled on Googol. However, when Sean Anderson (another graduate student) searched to see if the domain was available, he accidentally typed "https://www.google.com/search?q=google.com" instead.
The typo stuck.
It’s kind of funny that one of the most powerful tech companies in history is named after a spelling mistake of a nine-year-old’s made-up word. But even Google, with all its servers and indexed pages, doesn't come close to a googol of anything. As of 2026, the estimated amount of data on the entire internet is measured in zettabytes. A zettabyte is $10^{21}$ bytes. We are still many, many orders of magnitude away from reaching a googol of bits.
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When Does This Number Actually Matter?
Is it just a party trick for math nerds? Mostly.
However, in the field of thermodynamics and the "heat death" of the universe, these massive numbers start to show up. Physicists use them to describe the probability of certain events or the time it would take for a black hole to evaporate.
Don Page, a physicist known for his work on black hole radiation, once calculated the "Poincaré recurrence time" for a specific state of the universe. When you get into the physics of deep time, you start seeing numbers like $10^{10^{10}}$—which is a googolplex.
A googolplex is 1 followed by a googol of zeros.
If you tried to write a googolplex on pieces of paper, you couldn't do it. There isn't enough matter in the universe to make the paper or the ink. Even if you could write tiny, microscopic zeros on every single atom in existence, you would run out of atoms long before you finished writing the number.
The Mathematical Weirdness of 100 Zeros
What’s interesting is how quickly we can get to a googol using exponents.
Mathematics is exponential, not linear. Our brains are linear. We think 1, 2, 3, 4. But math thinks 10, 100, 1000, 10,000. It scales in a way that feels aggressive.
If you take a standard deck of 52 cards and shuffle it, the number of possible arrangements is $52!$ (52 factorial). This is roughly $8 \times 10^{67}$. That is a massive number—every time you shuffle a deck thoroughly, you are likely holding a sequence of cards that has never existed before in the history of the world.
Yet, even that—the total possible combinations of a simple deck of cards—is still much, much smaller than a googol.
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Beyond the Googol: The Googolplex and More
While Milton Sirotta gave us the googol, he also gave us the googolplex. He suggested it should be "one, followed by writing zeros until you get tired."
Kasner, being a formal mathematician, decided that wasn't quite rigorous enough. He defined it as $10^{\text{googol}}$.
If you think a googol is big, the googolplex is terrifying. It’s so large that if you were to travel in a straight line through an infinite universe, you would eventually encounter a perfect duplicate of yourself—and a duplicate of the entire Earth—long before you traveled a googolplex of meters. Probability dictates that in a large enough (or infinite) space, every possible arrangement of atoms must repeat.
But a googolplex is so much larger than the "stuff" in our local neighborhood that it remains a purely theoretical curiosity.
Real-World Applications (Or Lack Thereof)
- Cryptography: Modern encryption uses massive prime numbers. While they are huge, they generally don't reach the googol scale because computers need to actually process them.
- Cosmology: As mentioned, the lifespan of the universe is sometimes measured in scales approaching googols of years.
- Combinatorics: In complex games like Go or Chess, the number of possible legal positions is massive. For Chess, the Shannon number is about $10^{120}$—which is actually larger than a googol.
Wait, did I just say that?
Yes. The number of possible games of chess is larger than the number of atoms in the universe. It’s also larger than a googol. That is where "how much is a googol" becomes a practical question for AI researchers. To "solve" chess or Go, you have to navigate a space that is larger than the physical universe itself.
Insights for the Curious Mind
Understanding a googol isn't about memorizing the zeros. It’s about humility. It’s a reminder that the universe of the mind—the things we can calculate and imagine—is vastly larger than the universe we can touch and see.
When you look at the number $10^{100}$, remember it's a bridge. It bridges the gap between the mundane things we count every day and the staggering, terrifying scales of deep time and quantum probability.
If you want to dive deeper into this, I recommend checking out Edward Kasner’s original work. It’s surprisingly readable for a math book. Also, look into the "Graham's Number" or "TREE(3)" if you want to see numbers that make a googol look like a tiny speck of dust.
To wrap your head around these scales in a practical way, start by comparing orders of magnitude rather than just adding zeros. Every time you add one to the exponent, you aren't just making the number "bigger"—you are making it ten times larger than it was before. Do that 100 times, and you’ve left reality behind entirely.
Next Steps for Exploration
- Visualizing Scale: Use a tool like the "Scale of the Universe" interactive map to see how atoms compare to galaxies, then remember that a googol is still orders of magnitude beyond the atom count of those galaxies.
- Probability Exercises: Research the "Infinite Monkey Theorem." It deals with the same kind of "impossible" scales that the googol represents.
- Read the Source: Find a copy of Mathematics and the Imagination by Kasner and Newman. It’s a classic for a reason and explains these concepts with a wit that most modern textbooks lack.