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Large (9x7-9x12)
Large numbers are numbers that are significantly larger than those ordinarily used in everyday life, for instance in simple counting or in monetary transactions. more...
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The term typically refers to large positive integers, or more generally, large positive real numbers, but it may also be used in other contexts.
Very large numbers often occur in fields such as mathematics, cosmology and cryptography. Sometimes people refer to numbers as being "astronomically large". However, it is easy to mathematically define numbers that are much larger than those even in astronomy.
Using scientific notation to handle large and small numbers
Scientific notation was created to handle the wide range of values which occur in scientific study. 1.0 × 109, for example, means one billion, a 1 followed by nine zeros: 1 000 000 000, and 1.0 × 10−9 means one billionth, or 0.000 000 001. Writing 109 instead of nine zeros saves readers the effort and hazard of counting a long series of zeros to see how large the number is.
Adding a 0 at the end of a number multiplies it by 10: 100 is 10 times 10. In scientific notation, however, the exponent only increases by one, from 101 to 102.
- See also: scientific notation, logarithmic scale, and orders of magnitude
Large numbers in the everyday world
Examples of large numbers describing everyday real-world objects are:
the number of bits on a computer hard disk (as of 2006, typically about 1012, 125 GB);
the number of cells in the human body (more than 1014);
the number of neuronal connections in the human brain (estimated at 1014);
Avogadro's number (i.e. the number of atoms in 12 grams of carbon-12, approximately 6.022 × 1023);
Astronomically large numbers
Other large numbers, as regards length and time, are found in astronomy and cosmology. For example, the current Big Bang model of the Universe suggests that it is 13.7 billion years (4.3 × 1017 seconds) old, and that the observable universe is 78 billion light years across (7.4 × 1026 metres), and contains about 5 × 1022 stars, organized into around 80 thousand million galaxies.
Combinatorial processes rapidly generate even larger numbers. The factorial function, which defines the number of permutations on a set of fixed objects, grows very rapidly with the number of objects. Stirling's formula gives a precise asymptotic expression for this rate of growth.
Combinatorial processes generate very large numbers in statistical mechanics. These numbers are so large that they are typically only referred to using their logarithms.
Read more at Wikipedia.org
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