Google is the world’s largest and most popular internet search engine but did you know it gets its name from Googol; one of the largest named numbers in modern mathematics?
At 10^100 Googol is a pretty large number. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta in 1920 at just 9 years. As the nephew of US mathematician Edward Kasner, the term was soon popularised by Kasner’s book “Mathematics and the Imagination”.
The widespread sounding of the word occurs globally because of the search engine we know ever too well: Google. Believe it or not, the company name Google is actually an accidental misspelling of the number Googol which was picked by the company’s founders to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information.
In more recent times, back in 2004, family members of Kasner, who had inherited the right to his book, were considering suing Google for their use of the term Googol; however, no suit was ever filed.
Since 2009 Google have been assigning domain names to its servers under the domain “1e100.net” in order to provide a single domain to identify all serves across the Google network. 1e100 is the scientific notation for 1 Googol.
So, Google is an enormous network and now you know how and why its name signifies so! Next time you’re searching on our popular network, remember just how big Google is and then name behind the size.
