What is the largest number you pronounced in your life? Trillion? Quadrillion? It turns out that numbers exist, even in practice, that are billions and billions of times large! They can not be found neither in school problems, nor in solving any domestic issues, nor 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 this is at least tens of thousands of years.
At first, a man counted on the fingers. However, the tribes that are at the primitive stage of development, do so still. Later, people learned to measure the number of objects by making nicks on wood, clay, and bone. Finally, special names were introduced for spoken language and symbols for written language. However, the origin of giant numbers affects quite a recent time, namely, the historical period of the existence of mankind.
Complexity of concepts
The historical period is a period of time in which a person has already learned to fix in writing everything that happens to him. People began to talk hundreds of thousands of years ago, and we can write only a few millennia. It turns out that giant numbers and their names appeared recently by the standards of history.
Why haven’t they been invented before? Yes, they were simply not needed.
The first reason for the invention of numbers was household needs. How else to exchange, sell, lend, monitor the distribution of food, drink and other goods? Without an account - no way.
And how many numbers are needed to count the sheep in the herd? Suppose hundreds. The path is even thousands! To measure the number of sheaves of wheat, clay bowls, the population of the ancient village, in the end, you can tens of thousands of units - and it will turn out with a margin. Giant numbers are not needed here at all. So, there was no need to invent them either.
New areas of knowledge
Gradually, more and more new areas began to appear in which thousands could no longer be dispensed with. Mints printed money - how many metal circles can you print on an entire state? Millions! And how many stone blocks are needed to build the Cheops pyramid? Two million three hundred thousand. However, these are not even such giant numbers, we use them today in everyday life - the population of St. Petersburg, for example, is more than 5 million people, although it was impossible to imagine this before.
But the biggest numbers were needed only in the
new time, when people came close to a science such as astronomy. The distance to planets and stars is calculated in such enormous 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 the 5th grade they talk about numbers, but usually they are silent about why you can meet the same words, for example, in music.
Everything, it turns out, is simple: these roots came from the Latin language, which for many centuries has been 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". One single language left a deep imprint on the entire world of science, including the name of the numerals.
Giants
In describing the cosmos, perhaps, you will have to use only numbers - giants. If there are innumerable 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, i.e., the distance that light travels over a year's journey. 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 estimated in sextillion tons. This is ten in the twenty first degree, that is, with twenty one zero after the first digit! If measured in kilograms, then we get septillion.
And dwarf numbers can be obtained very easily - by dividing the unit 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 measure - 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. Add “kilo-” - means, multiply by a thousand. “Mega” - for a million, “giga” - for a billion, “tera-” - for a whole trillion.
Remember what are the units of memory in a computer? Kilobytes, gigabytes, terabytes. For example, a photograph “weighs” several megabytes. And the modern game is ten, or even twenty gigabytes, that is, billions of bytes. And how would people manage 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 farad (this is a unit of electrical capacity, named after famous scientist Michael Faraday).
Interesting Facts
The information giant Google, the creator of the most popular search engine, is named "in honor" of a unit followed by one hundred zeros (ten to a hundredth power) - for units followed by a larger number of zeros, their own name has not been invented. The correct name of this largest number “with a name” is “googol”, however, the company preferred to change it a little.
Interesting facts about giant numbers can be given from a wide 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 the Indian ruler in chess and asked him to give him 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 - back two times more. Do you want to know how many grains get to the last cell? Write on a piece of paper the number that (in your opinion) should turn out, and then count it yourself. You can use a calculator or a computer. You will probably be surprised to see the answer.
Next to us
Many of these large (and small) quantities a person simply does not see, although there are countless examples. Do you know how big the bacteria are? A few hundred nanometers is a million times smaller than the minimum division on the school line! "Nano" comes from the Latin word "dwarf", or rather you can’t pick it up. You will not see an object of this size even in every microscope ... By the way, again: “micro” is one millionth of a million.
Do you know how much hair a person has on his head? This is not even tens, but hundreds of thousands of units. However, in comparison with a cat, we can be considered almost bald: on one animal the number of hairs is an order of magnitude larger.
In nature, in general, huge numbers are found at every step. How many nuts and acorns can be counted in the forest? And the flowers in the meadow? If there are several thousand grains in one poppy seed box, how many are there in the poppy field? I wonder how many unusual things nature came up with. And now we also found out how many unusual objects and phenomena are.
In fact, with words like “giant numbers” and “baby numbers,” adults do not use them. These concepts were invented exclusively for students to summarize those very large and very small quantities that you will soon study. But everyone uses numbers themselves - engineers and doctors, economists and teachers. There is probably no area in which these words are not used.
In general, it is necessary to remember the names to at least trillions, and in the direction of reduction - 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 mathematics, it develops thinking. It’s also interesting!