Welcome to NRICH.

 
What is 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000?
By Ananya Tiwari (P3133) on Tuesday, October 17, 2000 - 08:17 pm:

I am 10 years old. My problem is that I've been asked to find out what this number would be called 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (like million, trillion etc.)?

Can you please tell me urgently?

By Ashley England (Ae223) on Tuesday, October 17, 2000 - 11:48 pm:

Hi Ananya

I'm not too sure if you have encountered standard form (I hadn't at age 10). It's basically a way of writting very big numbers in a smaller amount of space.

If we start with 10 and then mutiply it by 10. we get 100. we can write this as 102 as we multiplied by ten twice.

Every time we miltiply by 10 we are adding an extra zero to our answer, so 10×10×10×10=10,000. This can be written as 104 because we multiplied by 10 four times.

Now, in your big long number there are 21 zeros, so we write 1021 = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
This is close but is is 6 times too small, so we write 6 × 1021 = 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

This is called writing a number in 'standard form'. We know if we had 6,000 we could write this as 6 × 103, and this is said as "6 thousand" now there is no easy way to work out what the word is. So we look it up - now this is why we had to put it into standard form as anywhere I have found the table of names they aren't written out in full as some of them have more that 100 zero's.

Just so I'm not doing all the work for you - you can look up the table on the internet yourself - there is a version at Names of Larger Numbers
On the table thery write 10^k instead of 10k but they mean exactly the same thing.

The table has two colums, one for the American, and one of the European words as they are different.

Isn't the word for 10100 zero's just great!!

Any more problems just drop me a line.
Ashley England

By Ananya Tiwari (P3133) on Thursday, October 19, 2000 - 07:09 pm:

Thanks Ashley

I've got my answer. This will help me in my school.

By Anonymous on Saturday, October 21, 2000 - 02:10 pm:

6 sextillion, almost the weight, in tons, of the Earth.