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Googols: Strings of Zeros


mmarotta

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When teaching math and science to middle schoolers, I remembered the various issues of banknotes that run over 1 million (10^6). I found these useful as tangible tools for teaching scientific notation.

 

Modern Turkey just lopped six zeroes off its money. The case of the modern fragments of the modern Yugoslavia is also within memory. Hungary's "adopengo" were probably the best example of the worst case with billions of pengo becoming millions of adopengo overnight --- and neither being worth much on the street.

 

German postage stamps from the Notgeld era c. 1922 often show "TAUSEND" and "MILLIONEN" overprinted on the original denominations of 1, 5, and 10 mark. German currency from the period also runs into the thousands, millions and milliards (=billions).

 

The term "googol" means 1 followed by 100 zeroes. Milton Sirotta, the nine-year old nephew of mathematician Edward Krasner, is credited with inventing the word.

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