what is a googol

A googol is a large number, specifically 10¹⁰⁰, which is written as the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. The term was coined in 1920 by 9-year-old Milton Sirotta. A googol has no special significance in mathematics, but it is useful when comparing with other very large quantities such as the number of subatomic particles in the visible universe or the number of hypothetical possibilities in a chess game. A googol is approximately 70! (factorial of 70) . Using an integral, binary numeral system, one would need 333 bits to represent a googol, i.e., 1 googol = ≈ 2332.19280949. However, a googol is well within the maximum bounds of an IEEE 754 double-precision floating-point type, but without full precision in the mantissa. The word "googol" has been overshadowed by the household word Google, based on the search engine, whose name originated with a misspelling of googol.