The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...

When you move beyond trillions, there are some extremely mind-bending numbers, says Richard Fisher. Some of them are too large to fit in the mind – or even within the known Universe. What's the ...

Imagine a horizontal line. The very left is marked one thousand and the very right is marked one billion. On this line, where would you add a marker to represent one million? If you said somewhere in ...

The law of large numbers describes how the results of an experiment will get closer to the expected value if a person repeats it a significant number of times and calculates an average. It bears some ...

Peter Shor didn’t set out to break the internet. But an algorithm he developed in the mid-1990s threatened to do just that. In a landmark paper, Shor showed how a hypothetical computer that exploited ...

Mathematicians have reportedly discovered a new way of multiplying two numbers together. The new technique is for really large numbers, and if it passes a peer-review, could be the fastest possible ...

Introducing the world's largest known prime... The largest known prime number has been discovered by a computer at a university in Missouri in the US. Prime numbers - such as two, three, five and ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. I have a confession to make: I hate big numbers. Or rather, I hate it when big numbers are used to impress or ...

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