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Friday 21 Jul 2006: The number googol
A googol in mathematics is the number 10 raised to the power 100. The term is said to have been coined in 1920 by nine-year-old Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. 1 googol is roughly equal to 70! and its only prime factors are 2 and 5. The search engine Google's PR department has the following to say on the company's name: "Google is a play on the word googol [and] Google's use of the term reflects the company's mission to organize the immense, seemingly infinite amount of information available on the web." P.S. 1 googol = 10^100 = 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000.

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