These mathematicians think that really big numbers are just made up, even though they’re used every day.
Imagine you have a box full of marbles, like the ones you play with at recess. If there are 10 marbles, it’s easy to count them all. But what if someone says there are a million marbles in that same box? That sounds impossible, right? It feels like the box should be as big as a house!
Large numbers can feel like they’re from another world, something you can’t touch or see. Some mathematicians think this way too. They believe that if you can't count them all one by one, they might not really exist in the same way smaller numbers do.
Counting Like You're at a Party
Think about being at a birthday party with your friends. If there are 5 of you, it’s easy to know everyone is there. But what if someone says 100 people came to the party? That feels like a crowd, but how can you be sure every single person is counted?
These mathematicians are like kids who only believe in things they can count directly. To them, large numbers might just seem like stories or guesses, not real things that exist in the world around them!
Examples
- A child thinks a million is the biggest number because that’s all they’ve ever heard.
- Someone says there are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on Earth, but it feels too big to be real.
- You think about how many people have lived before you and feel confused by the idea.
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See also
- What Is Infinity Actually Like?
- How Does Pi - Numberphile Work?
- How Does Every Unsolved Prime Number Problem Work?
- How Does A Brief History of Number Systems (1 of 3: Introduction) Work?
- How Does The infinite life of pi - Reynaldo Lopes Work?