Numbers

In class the other day, we were talking about numbers and somehow the conversation went from 1,000,000 to 1,000,000,000 to 1,000,000,000,000 (just writing random numbers on the board and trying to say them...they were probably telling me how many stickers they wanted me to give them).

Well, I realized that I had no idea what came after a trillion. So I googled it and found there are a lot of numbers.

quadrillion
quintillion
sextillion
septillion
octillion

and allllll the way up to 10 to the 100th : a googol (There's even a number called a googolplex that is 1 followed by a googol zeros).

I remember being little and we would talk about a googol. We probably just knew it was big and liked saying it. Fun to know now that it's a real number.

I guess these numbers aren't exactly useful. I remember reading a book in the 2nd grade that says it would take 29 non-stop days of counting to reach just one million. Numbers are big (or very small). They boggle my mind.