Monday, September 20, 2004

Giants among finites

I rarely blog about math because the math I work on is incomprehensible without a lot of background knowledge. However, there's lots of math out there that is nontrivial yet broadly accessible and hence bloggable. A recently ran across this little gem about really really large numbers. You see, the number described by the short string "3--->3--->3" cannot even be written down using standard exponential notation. (Exercise: prove that 3--->3--->3 = 3^^(3^27).)