Cambridge, MA - Theoretical mathematicians near Harvard have announced the discovery of a new candidate for the world's biggest number.
"It's a really, really big number," Geraldine Grogan, Chief of Math at the Dunkin' Institute for the Study of Numbers, explained. "Think of the biggest number you know. Hold it in your mind. Got it? This one is bigger. A lot bigger."
Grogan, a mathematician who fell in love with big numbers as a young child when she first learned about eleven, is used to skepticism when it comes to communicating the science behind them to the public. "I wish I had a microBitcoin for every time someone asked me why I don't just add one to the biggest number to get a new biggest number. But it's just not that simple!"
Discovering new and bigger numbers has become increasingly difficult over the past few decades, with announcements like this now coming every few years rather than several each day. Abacus Wilmore, a math historian who has written about numbers since the early 1970s, remembers a time when big number researchers were treated like rock stars. "You had five or six new big ones a day back then, and people just went nuts over it. Then the numbers started drying up and people got competitive. It got ugly. And the cocaine didn't help."
The addition of a new biggest number to our understanding of the natural world is unlikely to have a noticeable impact on the day-to-day lives of most people. Grogan, who is the granddaughter of James Grogan, the first person to spell "boobies" using an upside down calculator, says that practical applications are not the point of big numbers. "What is the practical application of a beautiful painting or a poem? Big numbers add beauty to our lives and they subtract suffering. Did you see what I did there?"
She's right. I tried to add "one" to it and my laptop melted.