Big numbers

The terms used for big numbers differ between the UK and the USA and other parts of the world. Until recently, a billion was a million in the US, but a thousand million everywhere else. The UK has changed this definition to match the rest of the world, but other big numbers are still different. There are names for even bigger numbers, including a trigent- billion (60,000,003 zeros) and sextant-billion (1,800,000,003 zeros). In 1938, nine-year-old Milton Sirotta came up with the word googol, which means a one followed by 100 zeros. Mathematician called Edward Kasner (1878-1955). A googolplex is an even bigger number – a one with a googol of zeros, or 10 to the googol power. This number is so vast that, as Kasner explained,”…there would not be enough room to write it, if one went to the furthest stars, touring all the nebulae in the universe and putting down zeros every inch of the way.” There is no such number as a zillion – the word just means a huge amount.