This video helps you envision very large numbers

boing
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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/30/this-video-helps-you-envision.html

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I was told there would be no math.

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Envisioning huge numbers using the vastness of the Universe is my day job. And, at the risk of hubris, I’m pretty good at it.

Now, doing a quick count of my shopping basket to make sure I meet the “12 Items or Less” threshold…

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Have I mentioned my discomfort with the fact the exp(i*pi) = -1

Also (and maybe more relevant):
The set of all odd integers <? the set of all integers

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I prefer this visualization:

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Ronald Graham of Graham’s number died earlier this month.

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Great googly moogly!

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The cardinality of the set of all odd integers is equal to the cardinality of the set of all integers.

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Great content but…its a UK thing: I cant wait for the “localisation” dropdown menu, so I can select Brian Cox to VO it or even Brian Blessed lol.

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fun facts, but I could not get past the narrator’s annoying voice.

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for me, it’s not so much his voice as his script. Get to the point!

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Is it pronounced “Grarm” or “Gray-um”?

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Brady says gray-um, and he met him.

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I just cited him a paper last year, and I’m not even remotely in the same area(s) of mathematics as he was. Quite a mathematician.

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Here’s my favorite “OMG, Numbers Are Awesome” explainer (envisioner?), with dots and stuff…

https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/from-1-to-1000000.html

This one is cool, too. No dots though…

https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-number.html

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My HS math teacher was obsessed with this equation. Although he wrote it as:

exp(I*pi) + 1 = 0

I guess he wanted to get addition in there for fun.

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It’s definitely one of those cases where you follow the notation and use the rules far beyond the analogies they were based on. Humans discovered exponentiation by thinking about repeated multiplication, so what the heck does it even mean to raise a number to an imaginary power? Well, we have this thing called a Taylor series expansion, let’s try that, oh look, e^ix expands to exactly the sum of the expansions of cosx and isinx, oh look, that’s turns out to be so useful!

“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact” - Mark Twain

See also: essentially all of Alice in Wonderland, which almost everyone seems to insist on mistaking for a children’s book, even after they know Lewis Caroll taught mathematics at Oxford.

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What do you mean if that’s what your grandmother calls it? That is what it is called, google search engine. And it is a poor one at that, searching. Why not use a better search like Bing or duckduckgo. google sucks.

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The canonical explanation is that the equation incorporates five pretty important numbers: e pi i 1 and 0.

https://www.wabash.edu/magazine/2002/WinterSpring2002/mostbeautiful.html

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