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From 1,000,000 to Graham's Number — Wait But Why

waitbutwhy.com · 6,401 words · saved by 1 readers

Graham's number is so big, we need a whole new set of tools to even discuss it.

Welcome to numbers post #2. Last week , we started at 1 and slowly and steadily worked our way up to 1,000,000. We used dots. It was cute. Well fun time’s over. Today, shit gets real. Before things get totally out of hand, let’s start by working our way up the still-fathomable powers of 10— Powers of 10 When we went from 1 to 1,000,000, we didn’t need powers—we could just use a short string of digits to represent the numbers we were talking about. If we wanted to multiply a number by 10, we just added a zero. But as you advance past a million, zeros start to become plentiful

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