Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Mathematics/2014 December 18

Welcome to the Wikipedia Mathematics Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

December 18

Math & Value definition

If you receive 1 for 100, how much will you receive for 1,000,000,000,000,000,000.00?

How would you do the math?

How would you pronounce 1,000,000,000,000,000,000.00? - Is this 1 Zillion/Trillion?

What's the highest sum (word) known to human kind? Is it a 'Zillion'?

(Russell.mo (talk) 14:59, 18 December 2014 (UTC))

You might want to see names of large numbers. What you have here is a trillion (European naming) or a quintillion (US naming). YohanN7 (talk) 15:10, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

Just noting in passing here that so-called "US naming" is now almost completely standard across the English-speaking world. It may be in some sense less "logical", but it's more convenient, and that seems to have won out. See long and short scales. --Trovatore (talk) 20:15, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

Yes, more convenient, just like furlongs and pence, shillings and pound sterlings (Not)

Yes, it really is more convenient. To use the long scale, you have to use either locutions like "thousand million", "thousand billion", etc, or "milliard", "billiard", etc. The "thousand million" solution is longwinded; the other solution is virtually unknown in English. --Trovatore (talk) 21:47, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

You are right. But a universal naming with *-ion and *-iard would have been logical. At any rate, these are big numbers. Bigger numbers than this are called astronomical numbers. Yet bigger ones are called economical numbers (Feynman). YohanN7 (talk) 22:08, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

A Brazilian can get pretty high, especially around Carnival. Sławomir Biały (talk) 16:01, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

Nobody's answered the original question - you get one hundredth of the stated amount, i.e knock two zeros off before the decimal point.→86.157.199.240 (talk) 22:34, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

To answer another of the original questions, there is no such number as a zillion; it's just a slang word for a very, very big number. The -illion sequence is sometimes considered to end at a centillion (with 303 zeroes in what's called "US naming" or "short scale" above, or 600 zeroes in the other system), but as you will see at that article, others take the sequence still higher. In practice nobody uses these large names; they would express the numbers in other ways. As far as I know the googolplex is the largest number named with a single word; it ends with 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 zeroes and there is not nearly enough matter in the known universe to write it out in full. --65.94.50.4 (talk) 00:55, 19 December 2014 (UTC)

As you said, nobody uses "these large names", and it is very rare for anyone to use the words for numbers larger than a short-scale trillion, because larger numbers usually occur only in scientific contexts (such as number of molecules in a measure of material or distance to stars), and the scientists use scientific notation. Very small quantities, the inverses of very large quantities, are of course also represented in scientific notation. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:51, 22 December 2014 (UTC)

Thanks peeps, thanks to the ones, the most, who specified what was needed to know. I'm on two weeks holiday which started today, forced upon me, so I read the article stated in this post, otherwise you all would've heard me moaning for explanations. Thank you for stating the equation.

(Russell.mo (talk) 06:45, 19 December 2014 (UTC))

Resolved