What is the biggest number you have ever said in your life? Trillion? quadrillion? It turns out that there exist and are even used in practice numbers that are billions and billions of times larger! They cannot be found either in school tasks, or when solving any everyday issues, or on advertising posters on the street … However, there are areas in which one cannot do without giant numbers (and dwarfs!)
History
The concept of numbers has been known to mankind for a long time. Of course, scientists cannot say the exact number of years, but it is at least tens of thousands of years.
At first, the man counted on his fingers. However, tribes that are at the primitive stage of development still do this. Later, people learned to measure the number of objects by making notches in wood, clay and bone. Finally, special names were introduced for oral speech and symbols for writing. However, the origin of giant numbers affects quite recent times, namely, the historical period of the existence of mankind.
Complexity of concepts
Historical period is a period of time in which a person has already learned to record in writing everything that happens to him. People began to talk hundreds of thousands of years ago, and we know how to write only a few millennia. It turns out that the giant numbers and their names appeared quite recently by the standards of history.
Why weren't they invented sooner? Yes, they were simply not needed.
The first reason for the invention of numbers was economic needs. Otherwise, how to exchange, sell, lend, monitor the distribution of food, drink and other benefits? Without an account - nothing.
And how many numbers do you need to count the sheep in the herd? Let's say hundreds. Way even thousands! In the end, it is possible to measure the number of sheaves of wheat, clay bowls, the population of an ancient village in tens of thousands of units - and that will work out with a margin. There is no need for giant numbers here. So, there was no need to invent them.
New Areas of Knowledge
Gradually, more and more new areas began to appear, in which thousands were no longer enough. Mints printed money - how many metal circles can be printed for a whole state? Millions! And how many stone blocks do you need to build the pyramid of Cheops? Two million three hundred thousand. However, these are not such giant numbers, we use them today in everyday life - the population of St. Petersburg, for example, is more than 5 million inhabitants, although this was simply impossible to imagine before.
But the biggest numbers were needed only in modern times, when people came closeto the science of astronomy. The distance to planets and stars is calculated in such huge quantities that none of the known numbers simply could not be suitable for calculations.
Origin of names
Where did the names of giant numbers come from? In grade 5, they talk about numbers, but usually they don’t say why you can find the same words, for example, in music.
Everything, it turns out, is simple: these roots came from the Latin language, which for many centuries was the language of European science. Therefore, in physics you will see "septillion", in music - an interval called "septima", and if you start learning Spanish - the word "septimo", meaning "seventh". A single language has left a deep imprint on the entire world of science, including the names of numerals.
Giants
When describing the cosmos, perhaps, we will have to use only numbers - giants. If there are an incalculable number of stars in the sky, then how many planets, comets, asteroids, meteorites! The speed of light is hundreds of millions of meters per second, and the distance to the nearest stars is measured in light years, that is, the distance that light travels in a year of travel. And this, on a cosmic scale, can be considered an instant.
However, there are giant numbers on our planet. For example, the mass of the Earth is calculated in sextillions of tons. This is ten to the twenty-first power, that is, with twenty-one zeros after the first digit! If you measure in kilograms, you get septillions.
And dwarf numbers are obtained very easily - by dividing one by "giants".
Prefixes
In science, there are a number of prefixes that allow you to briefly convey the names of giant numbers and dwarfs. How inconvenient it would be to talk every time, for example, about “millions of watts” or “thousandths of a meter”! So people came up with "megawatts" and "millimeters".
You can take any unit of measurement - meters, grams, volts, newtons, watts - add a prefix to the beginning of the word and get the designation of a very large or very small number. We add "kilo-" - which means we multiply by a thousand. "Mega-" - per million, "giga-" - per billion, "tera-" - per trillion.
Remember what units of memory are called in a computer? Kilobytes, gigabytes, terabytes. For example, a photo "weighs" several megabytes. And a modern game is ten or even twenty gigabytes, that is, billions of bytes. And how would people manage here without giant numbers?
Very small numbers can also be called using prefixes: "milligram" - one thousandth of a gram, "micron" - one millionth of a meter, "nanosecond" - one billionth of a second, "picofarad" - one trillionth of a farad (this is a unit of measurement capacity, named after the famous scientist Michael Faraday).
Interesting facts
Information giant Google, creator of the world's most popular search engine, is named "after" a one followed by one hundred zeros (ten to the hundredth power) - for ones followed by more zeros, its own name is alreadywas not invented. The correct name for this largest number "with a name" is "googol", but the company chose to change it somewhat.
Interesting facts about giant numbers can be cited from a variety of areas. For example, inside each of us there is such a huge number of capillaries that they could wrap the globe, more than once!
There is a well-known legend about how a scientist beat an Indian ruler in chess and asked for rice grains as a reward: for the first cell of the board - one piece, for the second - twice as much, i.e. two, for the third - twice as much. Do you want to know how many grains will turn out to the last cell? Write on a piece of paper the number that (in your opinion) should turn out, and then count for yourself. You can use a calculator or computer. You will be surprised to see the answer.
Next to us
Many people simply do not see many of such large (and small) values, although there are countless examples. Do you know how big a bacterium is? A few hundred nanometers is a million times less than the smallest division on a school ruler! "Nano" comes from the Latin word "dwarf", or rather you can't pick it up. An object of this size and not in every microscope you will see … By the way, again: "micro" - one millionth part.
Do you know how many hairs a person has on their head? These are not even tens, but hundreds of thousands of units. However, compared with a cat, we can be considered practicallyhairless: one animal has an order of magnitude more hairs.
In nature, in general, at every step there are huge numbers. How many nuts and acorns can you count in the forest? And the flowers in the meadow? If there are several thousand seeds in one poppy box, how many are there in a poppy field? You are amazed at how many unusual things nature has come up with. And now we also found out what is the number of all unusual objects and phenomena.
Actually, such words as “giant numbers” and “small numbers” are not used by adults. These concepts are invented solely for students to generalize those very large and very small quantities that you will soon be studying. But everyone uses the numbers themselves - engineers and doctors, economists and teachers. There is probably no area where these words are not used.
In general, it is necessary to memorize the names up to at least trillions, and downwards - up to the values indicated by the prefix "nano". In high school, you will meet all these words regularly, and in everyday life they are used.
And also - learn math, it develops thinking. Plus, it's fun!
