'Google', or how the idea of infinity intrigues humanity.

Around 1920, the American mathematician Edward Kasner (1878-1955) was looking for a name for a very large number— ^10¹⁰⁰ , that is, 1 followed by 100 zeros—that would capture the attention of children. His 9-year-old nephew, Milton, suggested calling it "googol," and this name was popularized by Kasner in his book "Mathematics and Imagination."

A googol is an enormous number. To give you an idea, it is estimated that the number of atoms in the entire observable universe is 10 ^⁸⁰ , meaning 1 followed by "only" 80 zeros. A googol is 100 billion billion times larger!

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But little Milton knew very well that there are even bigger numbers, and he even proposed a name for one of them: "googolplex" is 10 ^googol , that is, 1 followed by a googol of zeros.

The googolplex is so colossally large that it's impossible to write it out in full: there isn't enough space in the universe for all those zeros!

Many years later, in 1997, the creators of a new search engine decided to call their product "Googol," to suggest that it would be capable of processing enormous amounts of information. However, someone made a spelling mistake, and it ended up being spelled "Google."

Actually, that's an exaggeration: even today, the total amount of information stored on the internet doesn't reach 10 ^²³ bytes—one hundred trillion gigabytes—which isn't even close to a googol. Even so, the company's headquarters in California is called Googleplex…

The fascinating discovery that the set of numbers is endless, since we can always find a larger one, is our first encounter with the idea of infinity. And this idea has intrigued humanity since the beginning: Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Hindus, and Chinese—all the great civilizations have pondered the mysteries of infinity and, of course, its relationship to religion.

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