Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum. Here, counting to three is so easy a salamander can do it seriously. Lab experiments have shown that captive salamanders are able to distinguish between piles of two fruit flies and piles of three. If you're not impressed, when we understand, a human being who had never taken a single math class would have no trouble
doing the same thing. Some single digit numbers like one, two, and three are so small that our minds can recognize their value without even needing to count. Put a tray of three cookies in front of your average adult, and he or she will immediately and intuitively know how many. There are no fingers or calculators required. Yet as numbers grow bigger, our ability to comprehend their values starts to
break down. The word billion gets tossed around a lot by economists and politicians, but it's hard to appreciate just how large that some is. For example, have any idea how long a billion seconds is? Me? Neither or not until we did the math. It's thirty one years, two hundred and fifty one days, thirteen hours, and some thirty four point nine minutes, not counting leap days and leap seconds. By the commonly accepted definition we use today, one billion
is equal to eight thousand millions. Numerically, it's expressed as a one with nine zeros behind it. One trillion is understood to be a million millions, or a one with twelve zeros behind it. And to put that in perspective, let's say you've pulled an H. G. Wells and built
a functional time machine. If you ordered it to take you one trillion seconds back in time, you'd get to hang out with mammoths and sabertooth cats, because one trillion seconds is the equivalent of thirty one thousand, five hundred and forty six years. Okay, so a trillion is a one followed by twelve zeros. The next order of magnitude
is a quadrillion, which contains fifteen zeros. And you may be interested to know that a supercomputer that was recently unveiled at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee can make up to two hundred quadrillion calculations per second. It's roughly a million times faster than the average laptop. But regardless, if you took a pen, grab some paper, and wrote down a nice tidy row of one hundred individual zeros,
then put a one in front of them. The massive figure you'll see before you is ten to the power of one hundred. Mathematician Edward Kastner took a fancy to this number. In his nine year old nephew, Milton, came up with a name for it, calling the super large sum a Google. Many years later, a misspelling of this term would be used as the name of the Internet top search engine. As enormous as a Google is, at
least you can write it down numerically. By this, we mean to say that you could, if you felt so inclined, write a one followed by one hundred zeros. The same cannot be said of a google plex. That, dear listener, is a one followed by a google's worth of zeros. No matter how tiny your handwriting is, e'll never be able to jot down all those zeros. There are more zeros in a googleplex than there are atoms in the observable universe. The only way to commit this figure to
paper is by using exponential notation. Written out that way, a googleplex is ten to the tenth to the one, and if you think a google plex is big, get a load of Skews number, which is ten to the tenth to the tenth to the thirty four. This one derives its name from Stanley Skews, a South African mathematician
with an interest in prime numbers. You may know that a prime is any number that can only be divided by itself and by the number one, and therefore three is a prime, but four is not, because it's divisible by two. To make a long story short, Skews was studying a mathematical function that's been used to give rough estimates of how many primes there are between zero and any number you might care to name. Excuse introduced his eponymous number to the world in a nineteen thirty three
paper and the words of one colleague. This was, at the time at least the largest number has ever served any definite purpose in mathematics. It's since lost that distinction to still bigger sums like Graham's number and the monstrous tree three. Both of these are way too vast for the human mind to grasp, yet each is finite and mathematically useful in its own way. Before wrapping up this discussion, let's take a step back to acknowledge a smaller figure.
In January, matth enthusiast Jonathan Pace identified what is, to date the biggest known prime number, named M seven seven two three seven. It contains more than twenty three million digits twenty three million, two hundred four hundred and twenty five of them to be exact. As such, it is nine hundred and ten thousand, eight hundred and seven digits
larger than the previous record holder. To be sure, this prime number isn't in the same league as the Google, the google Plex, or Skews number, but if you wrote it out in its entirety at a rate of five digits per inch, the whole thing would exeed seventy three miles. That's a hundred and eighteen kilometers in length. Sounds like a surefire way to get finger cramps. Today's episode was written by Mark Mancini and produced by Tyler Klang. For more on this and lots of other math magical topics,
visit our home planet how stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,