This list compares various sizes of positive numbers, including counts of things, dimensionless quantity and probabilities. Each number is given a name in the so called short scale which is used in English speaking countries, as well as a name in the long scale which is used in a series of countries that do not have English as their national language.
Computing: The number 5 is approximately equal to the smallest positive non-zero value that can be represented by a double-precision IEEE floating-point value.
Computing: The number 1.4 is approximately equal to the smallest positive non-zero value that can be represented by a single-precision IEEE floating-point value.
10-36
(0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 001; 1000-12; short scale: one undecillionth, long scale: one sextillionth)
10-33
(0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 001; 1000-11; short scale: one decillionth, long scale: one quintilliardth)
10-30
(0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 001; 1000-10; short scale: one nonillionth, long scale: one quintillionth)
Mathematics ? Lottery: The odds of winning the Grand Prize (matching all 6 numbers) in the US Powerball Multistate Lottery, with a single ticket, under the rules as of 2006, are 146,107,962 to 1 against, for a probability of 7.
Mathematics ? Lottery: The odds of winning the Jackpot (matching the 6 main numbers) in the UK National Lottery, with a single ticket, under the rules as of 2003, are 13,983,816 to 1 against, for a probability of 7.
Mathematics - Poker: The odds of being dealt a royal flush in poker are 649,739 to 1 against, for a probability of 1.5 × 10-6
Mathematics ? Poker: The odds of being dealt a straight flush (other than a royal flush) in poker are 72,192 to 1 against, for a probability of 1.4 × 10-5
Mathematics ? Poker: The odds of being dealt a four of a kind in poker are 4,164 to 1 against, for a probability of 2.4 × 10-4
BioMed ? HIV: About 1.2% of all 15?49 year-old humans were infected with HIVat the end of 2001
Mathematics ? Lottery: The odds of winning any prize in the UK National Lottery, with a single ticket, under the rules as of 2003, are 54 to 1 against, for a probability of about 0.018 (1.8%)
Mathematics ? Poker: The odds of being dealt a three of a kind in poker are 46 to 1 against, for a probability of 0.021 (2.1%)
Mathematics ? Lottery: The odds of winning any prize in the US Powerball Multistate Lottery, with a single ticket, under the rules as of 2006, are 36.61 to 1 against, for a probability of 0.027 (2.7%)
Mathematics ? Poker: The odds of being dealt two pair in poker are 20 to 1 against, for a probability of 0.048 (4.8%).
BioMed ? Species: The World Resources Institute claims that approximately 1.4 million species have been named, out of an unknown number of total species (estimates range between 2 and 100 million species)
Info ? Web sites: as of early 2008, the Wikipedia contains approximately 2,192,000 articles in the English language
Mathematics ? Playing cards: There are 2 598 960 different 5-card poker hands that can be dealt from a standard 52-card deck.
Geography/Computing ? Geographic places: The NIMA GEOnet Names Server contains approximately 3.88 million named geographical features outside the United States, with 5.34 million names. The USGS Geographic Names Information System claims to have almost 2 million physical and cultural geographic features within the United States
Mathematics: 275,305,224 is the number of 5x5 normal magic squares, not counting rotations and reflections. This result was found in 1973 by Richard Schroeppel. It is the third 91768409-gonal number.
Computing ? Computational limit of a 32-bit CPU: 2 147 483 647 is equal to 231?1, and as such is the largest number which can fit into a signed (two's complement) 32-bit integer on a computer, thus marking the upper computational limit of a 32-bit CPU such as Intel's Pentium-class computer chips.
BioMed ? base pairs in the genome: approximately 3 base pairs in the human genome
Computing - IPv4: 4,294,967,296 (232) possible unique IP addresses.
Computing: 4,294,967,296 - the number of bytes in 4 gibibytes; in computation, the 32-bit computers can directly access 232 pieces of address space, this leads directly to the 4 gigabyte limit on main memory.
Mathematics: 4,294,967,297 is a Fermat number and semiprime. It is the smallest number of the form 2^{2^n}+1 which is not a prime number.
Demographics ? world population: 6,587,890,000 - Estimated total mid-year population for the world in 2007 (April 10).
Computing ? web pages: approximately 8 web pages indexed by Google as of 2004
Mathematics ? Known digits of pi: As of 2002, the number of known digits of pi was 1 241 100 000 000.
Marine biology: 3,500,000,000,000 - estimated population of fish in the ocean.
BioMed ? Cells in the human body: the human body consists of roughly 1014cells, of which only 1013 are human.[2][3] The remainder of the cells are bacteria, which mostly reside in the gastrointestinal tract, although the skin is also covered in bacteria.
BioMed ? Insects: It has been estimated that the insect population of the Earth comprises roughly 1018 insects.
Computing ? Computational limit of a 64-bit CPU: 9.22 is equal to 263-1, and as such is the largest number which can fit into a signed (two's complement) 64-bit integer on a computer.
Mathematics ? NCAA Basketball Tournament: There are 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (263) possible ways to enter the bracket.
Mathematics ? Rubik's Cube: There are 4.3 different positions of a 3x3x3 Rubik's Cube
Password strength - Usage of the 95-character set found on standard computer keyboards for a 10-character password yields a computationally intractable 9510 (approximately 6) permutations.
Computing: The address range of IPv6 (2128) is approximately equal to 3.4, and is the theoretical maximum number of Internet addresses that can be allocated under the IPv6 addressing system.
Computing: The IEEE floating-point number 3.4028235 is approximately equal to the largest value that can be represented by a single-precision IEEE floating-point value.
Mathematics: 808,017,424,794,512,875,886,459,904,961,710,757,005,754,368,000,000,000 is order of Monster group
Cryptography: There are 6.27710174 different possible keys in the AES 192 bit keyspace (symmetric cipher).
Cosmology: 8 is roughly the number of Planck time intervals since the universe is theorized to have been created in the Big Bang 13.7 ± 0.2 billion years ago
Mathematics: 709,601,635,082,267,320,966,424,084,955,776,789,770,864,725,643,996,885,415,676,682,297 (?7) - The largest known prime factor found by ECM factorization as of August 2005[4]
Mathematics ? Cards: 52! = 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 (?8) - the number of ways to order the cards in a 52-card deck.
Mathematics: There are 282 870 942 277 741 856 536 180 333 107 150 328 293 127 731 985 672 134 721 536 000 000 000 000 000 (2.8287) possible permutations for the Professor's Cube (5x5x5 Rubik's Cube).
Cryptography: There are 1.15792089 different possible keys in the AES 256 bit keyspace (symmetric cipher).
Cosmology: various sources estimate the total number of fundamental particles in the observable universe in the range 1080 to 1085. However, these estimates are generally regarded as guesswork.
Mathematics: 243,112,608 × (243,112,609 ? 1) is a 25,956,377-digit perfect number, the largest known as of 2008.
Mathematics ? History: 1080,000,000,000,000,000, largest named number in Archimedes' Sand Reckoner.
Mathematics: 10googol (10^{10^{100}}), a googolplex.
Mathematics:10^{\,\!10^{10^{34}}}, order of magnitude of an upper bound that occurred in a proof of Skewes.
Mathematics:10^{\,\!10^{10^{1000}}}, order of magnitude of another upper bound in a proof of Skewes.
Mathematics:Moser's number should appear somewhere in this section, but is difficult to calculate.
Mathematics:Graham's number, ...64195387, probably the largest number seriously used in a mathematical proof; representation in powers of 10 would be impractical (the number of digits in the exponent far exceeds the number of particles in the observable universe).
Note: To correctly interpret the last few entries, keep in mind that exponentiation is performed from right to left. For example,
10^{\,\!10^{100}} \mbox{ means } 10^{\,\!(10^{100})}
Encyclopedia
top
