Some time ago, my oldest asked me what the biggest number was. Being something of a wonk, I answered him. “The biggest number with a name is a googolplex.”<\/p>\n
Of course, he thought I was making things up. So did his mother.<\/p>\n
I showed it to them online. The biggest named number is a googolplex. That will change as soon as someone names a bigger one, of course, but for now, that’s the biggest named number – and it’s really big.<\/p>\n
Ever since then, everything has been a googolplex. How big is that building? A googolplex. How hungry are you? I could eat a googolplex. How tall are you? I’m a googolplex.<\/p>\n
A week or so after this discussion, the big guy’s teacher tracked down his mother for a chat. This isn’t quite as bad as it sounds. She teaches at his school. It was bad enough, though.<\/p>\n
The big guy, the teacher reported, had discovered a new word. The other kids were very upset, thinking it was a bad word and he was insulting them. The teacher didn’t know what the bad word was or where it came from, but the big guy refused to stop – or even to admit he was doing anything wrong.<\/p>\n
Apparently, my son was there for this conversation, because his mom reports that he interrupted at that point. “But mom,” he wailed. “It’s not a bad word! It’s a googolplex!”<\/p>\n
Ah. <\/p>\n
His mom explained to the teacher, who went home and Google’d it. To her credit, she came in the next day and explained what a googolplex was to all the kids. To those of you saying that the teacher should have known what a googolplex was, I disagree. It’s about as obscure a piece of math trivia as you’ll find. The fact that she came back and taught the kids, on the other hand, speaks volumes. That’s the kind of teacher you want.<\/p>\n
I can only imagine all the other parents that evening looking at their kids saying “What? What did you say? Google-what?”<\/p>\n
I just hope they didn’t get in trouble.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Some time ago, my oldest asked me what the biggest number was. Being something of a wonk, I answered him. “The biggest number with a name is a googolplex.” Of course, he thought I was making things up. So did his mother. I showed it to them online. The biggest named number is a googolplex. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[118,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-7t","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}