From Christopher Cullen, School of Oriental and African Studies
Mike Holderness is right to say that in 21st-century science big numbers are
more common than ever before
(28 April, p 45).
But he is a bit behind the times in his implication that the problem of
writing down and visualising such numbers is at all new.
Take Archimedes, for instance. Around 225 BC he showed that the total number
of sand grains that would fill the Universe (as then conceived) could be written
down if you used a number equivalent to 10(8 ^times; 1016).
Not having modern notation, he had to express this as “a myriad myriad units of
numbers of the myriad myriadth order of the myriad myriadth period”.
And in China before the 6th century AD, the anonymous author of the book
Shushu jiyi, “Memoirs on the mathematical arts”, constructed ways of
writing numbers up to 104096 with ease: he was almost certainly working
on the basis of Buddhist ideas imported from India.
Mathematicians all over the world in past centuries have often “boldly gone”
to places that practical scientists have only needed to visit fairly recently.
That is, of course, why it is worthwhile for society to continue to pay
mathematicians to go on doing apparently useless things.
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