Thursday, June 05, 2008

the largest number in the universe

-from Wiki:

"Graham's number, named after Ronald Graham, is a large number often described as the largest finite number that has ever been seriously used in a mathematical proof.

"Guinness World Records even listed Graham's number as the World Champion largest number. Graham's number is much larger than other well known large numbers such as a googol and a googolplex, and even larger than Skewes' number and Moser's number, other well-known large numbers.

"Indeed, there is no concise way to write Graham's number, or any reasonable approximation using conventional mathematical operators. Even power towers (of the form a ^{ b ^{ c ^{ \cdot ^{ \cdot ^{ \cdot}}}}}) are useless for this purpose. It can be most easily notated by recursive means using Knuth's up-arrow notation or the Hyper operator.

G = g64 where g_1=3\uparrow\uparrow\uparrow\uparrow 3, g_n = 3\uparrow^{g_{n-1}}3


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Hmmm. Thought I'd seen several church covenants that tacked on enough man-made rules and legalisms to make Graham's Number pale in comparison.