Hello,
Until recently I’d forgotten that I love maths. I’ve had an on-off relationship with it. Adored it up to age 12, got distracted by other subjects from 12-15, struggled from 15-19 (integration – I’m looking at you), but warmed to it through the rest of my university and computing career.
Image from matsordenruntresa.blogspot.com
Now as a writer and mother it gets used here and there, unlike words which are the bricks of my trade.
Then I read “The Martian” by Andy Weir (brilliant book, can’t recommend it enough) and it reminded me why I loved maths in the first place. It is how the world works. Astronomy, physics, chemistry, baking, finance, art, music, computing, gaming, graphics (and much more) are fundamentally underpinned by mathematics and frankly, that makes it cool.
My kids already had that worked out (and really enjoyed “The Martian” movie last weekend). They’ve been fascinated with the concept of mathematical infinity ever since I mentioned it in passing one day. Well here’s another one for you – googolplex. This is the number represented as 1 in base ten (i.e. “normal numbers”!) with a googol of zeros after it. What’s a googol then? It is 10 to the power of 100 and was coined by a nine year old in 1920 as being “keep writing zeros until you get tired”.
According to QI, this means a googolplex is a number so vast that it can’t be written down as the universe isn’t vast enough to contain all the zeros.
See? Maths is cool.
Until next time happy reading, writing, and word (or number) fooling,
Grace
Wordfoolery 