Richard Elwes's "Huge Numbers"

Richard Elwes is an associate professor at University of Leeds, and a Holgate Session Leader for the London Mathematical Society.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Huge Numbers: A Story of Counting Ambitiously, from 4 1/2 to Fish 7, with the following results:

From page 99:

[...on three stelae (stone monuments) in the ancient city of Coba, another archaeological site in modern-day Mexico, we find the largest Mayan number discovered so far. They rewrite day zero as: 13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.13.0.0.0.0

Such inscriptions put the 3114BCE dawn of our world ‘more than 28 octillion years after the true initial base date in the incomprehensible past’, according to Mayan expert David Stuart, in his 2011 book, The Order of Days.]

He argues this date is the basis of a ‘Grand Long Count’, the fullest expression of the Mayan calendar which we usually see only in abbreviated form. The time for this whole grand long count to reset would be a cycle of over 15 nonillion days (1.5 × 10³¹) or 43 octillion years. We will see numbers on this scale in Chapter 7 when we think about the life cycle of the universe from the perspective of modern science. This reset date would take us to a point long beyond the demise not only of the sun but of the Milky Way galaxy itself, whose stars will long since have been snuffed out, and whose freezing remnants will have been consumed by a supermassive black hole or ejected into the cosmic vacuum. So if the Grand Long Count reset is imagined to represent the end of the world, the Maya would appear to have overestimated by some distance.

I think the Page 99 Test works pretty well here! We meet an interesting large number, which is the central thing, and think about it in two contexts: the mythology of an ancient civilisation (in this case the Classical Maya of Central America), and the evolution of the universe according to modern physics.

My book is in three parts, and these two perspectives reasonably well represent the first two parts. In part 1, we discuss different ways people have spoken and written large numbers over the millennia. The classical Maya, for example, were able to write numbers on this scale because they had developed a highly efficient written numeral system (essentially base 20 rather than the base 10 as we are used to). In part two, we consider the largest numbers needed to describe the Universe according to modern scientific understanding. The demise of the Sun, and then of the Milky Way galaxy, are milestones in the predicted life cycle of the cosmos, but the story has much further to run beyond these. The book's third part, not reflected in page 99, is about large numbers in the context of modern mathematics, and specifically mathematical logic, where we find numbers which are enormously bigger than anything ever contemplated previously.

Visit Richard Elwes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue