2008.12.06

2008.12.06. 12:31 Saturday

Future Plans for this Site

Unfortunately I'm going to be busy within the upcoming days, so I may have to postpone updates for at least a week. However it is my intention to update soon to revise old content, and provide new content.

Ideally my next update would be a month from now, and would include a completed Section II. I look forward to publishing section II because it is really going to get into the more interesting and popular large number topics. -illion numbers are a very popular topic amongst number enthusiasts, and they are mentioned almost as frequently as the Googol and Googolplex ( I don't think I'm going to go over the "Googol series" in section II, because I think it will fit better later on).

I want to make sense of the sometimes confusing world of -illion numbers. The fact is there is a lot of stuff out there that people have trouble sorting out. Besides the officially recognized illions, there are the latin based illions proposed by Conway, and an unusual set of "illions" coined by Jonathan Bowers which go much further than the usual attempts. Also there are many illions which mascerade as real numbers. Most people know that a "zillion" isn't an actual number but a very large indefinite one, but what about gijillion ? Wikipedia lists "gajillion" under "indefinite and fictious numbers", but the term "gijillion" was actually used to designate a well defined and actual number by Jonathan Bowers ! There are also a slew of ridiculous -illions coined everyday by ordinary people chatting in blogs and so forth. None of this are even remotely recognized by any official dictionary. Futher, the glut of these "amateur illions" are sometimes erronous, not well defined, or even meaningless, intentionally or unintentionally. In otherwords, one has to sift through the chaff to find the good grain ( well defined illions). For me it's more important that an illion number is well defined and part of a semi-logical naming system, than whether some scholars thinks it's usage is widespread enough to merit it with a stamp of approval. But I'll stop there before I give too much away !

Also I want to update and expand section I. Essentially Section I is there to go over the different ways we can notate numbers, while Section II assumes that the decimal notation is established and instead goes on from there. There are other notations I could explore in section I. For example, although I mention "bases" such as 12, 20 and 60, I don't actually have an article on "bases". Not everyone is familiar with them, so I think an article on them would be interesting, and would widen some peoples view on what "numerals" really are (ie. ideas).

I also have other plans, but I don't want to give too much away just yet. I hope people find my site interesting and want to learn more about large numbers. The problem is that few people truly devote serious attention to this subject. Most math sites will only contain a few choice pages on large numbers as a "diversionary topic". Few would devote a website to the topic. Also a lot of the information on large numbers is scattered across the web in small chunks. There are no websites, except a few rare exceptions , which gather all the information on large numbers into one place. This is my intention. I will try to actualize this, despite certain limitations.

Sincerely,

-- Sbiis Saibian