What is the number equivalent to 1e100 ?

Question

What is the number equivalent to 1e100 ?

And what is the reason behind it ? Can anybody explain it better ?

Answer 1

10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
When you see the notation e(somenumber) it means 10^(somenumber).

Answer 2

It's called a googol. It's hard to provide "the reason behind" a number. Can you elaborate?

Answer 3

it is googol

Answer 4

In all programming languages I know 1e100 is the short form for 1*10^100, i.e. a 1 followed by 100 zero's.

Answer 5

1e100 is a number. It can also be written as 10¹⁰⁰ or by it's name "googol".

It has two purposes:

1. Explaining the difference between a very, very, very large number and infinity to school children. Googol is much smaller than infinity.

2. Making Edward Kasner's nephew feel all chuffed about inventing a word when he was 9 that is used in teaching mathematics.

Answer 6

1e100 is equivalent to a 1 followed by 100 zeros. I won't write it out.

This is called scientific notation and NeM equals N * (Mth power of 10). As for the reason to use it, wiki summarizes it well:

Scientific notation is a very convenient way to write large or small numbers and do calculations with them. It also quickly conveys two properties of a measurement that are useful to scientists—significant figures and order of magnitude. Writing in scientific notation allows a person to eliminate zeros in front of or behind the significant digits.