About Community

Googology Community

The googology community is a loose association of amateur mathematicians and enthusiasts of large numbers who have gathered under the banner of "googology" to collect all the existing information on large numbers and the mathematics connected with them, as well as contribute some of their own ideas to the growing body of knowledge and conventions known as the "googological enterprise".

The emergence of the googology community was a relatively sudden and spontaneous event. On the surface of it, the fact that most people respond strongly (either positively or negatively) to large numbers, seems to make the emergence of such a community around such an interest seem inevitable, and yet as far as I know there were no ancient societies devoted to large numbers. The emergence of the googology community appears to be a modern phenomenon. It was precipitated by a number of key events. Foremost among them is the existence of the internet itself. Despite large numbers striking a common chord with most people, few would devote the amount of detailed investigation and interest in the subject that the so called "googologist's" do. Given that the numbers involved here are well beyond any practical purpose and only exist for the sake of human curiosity it's reasonable to suspect that most people would not devote serious thought for extended periods of time on the subject. The age of the internet however, paved the way so that a small community of so-inclined individuals separated by vast distances across the world could join in a common interest that could be sustained not for a few minutes of personal musing, but rather be a subject of continual debate, development and interest. The importance of the internet to the formation of the googology community can not be overstated, but is not really unique to googology however. Googology is just one example of an endless array of fringe groups that could not exist without it.

The internet alone however was not enough to get the community started. The very idea of forming a community around the idea of coming up with large numbers sounds outlandish and would have been hard to have imagined twenty years ago. Googology has what you might call it's "founders". People who codified what the aims of googology are. The earliest example we know of someone creating large numbers just to see how far you could take them would be Archimedes, when he wrote the famous "Sandreckoner" written sometime in the 3rd Century B.C. In more recent history, in 1904 a professor Henkle created an extended system of -illions extending up to the millionth member, again just to push the system of naming -illions as far as it could go. But no doubt the watershed moment was the publishing of "mathematics and the Imagination" by Edward Kasner in 1940. In it Kasner introduced the public to two massive numbers he made up: the googol and the googolplex. Since then this has served as the blue print for googology; the practice of coming up with whimsical names for truly massive out of this universe kinds of numbers. Between 1940 and the advent of the internet however, the flame never caught on. There is little doubt that people throughout this time probably extended on Kasner's ideas in their own private musings and writings, but no community of correspondence took flight.

In the early days of the internet, traces of what would become googology could be found scattered across the aether. Of the places that did focus on large numbers it was never more than a passing amusement. Then sometime in the 1990s Robert Munafo gathered a lot of this information into one place in two sub-sites of his titled "Numbers" and "Large Numbers". Here was, for the first time, an oasis of large numbers on the internet. Robert Munafo's site would serve as a blue print for many later websites devoted to large numbers, including to some extent, my own. But Munafo did not himself coin googolism's. His site was more like a work of journalism simply reporting on the systems and ideas of others, including amateurs and professional mathematicians. It would take a trail blazer, someone who would take not only the subject seriously, but give it a serious go themselves, to set the wheels in motion...

Then in the early 2000s two visionaries did just that and formed the basic ethos of googology. These visionaries are a mysterious character only known as "Andre Joyce" and a random dude from Texas named Jonathan Bowers. They are considered the founding fathers of modern googology. They both independently pioneered the idea of taking Kasner's recreational musing on large numbers and taking it to its logical conclusion: systems of defining and naming large numbers as far as the imagination could take them, without regards to a practical end, and without apology.

Andre Joyce coined the word "googology" and defined it as the study of "googol and googol like numbers. This term was then appropriated by the googology community and the definition was broadened to cover the study of large numbers in general, including the means of generating them and systems of nomenclature for naming them, as well as a body of conventions constituting "canonical works" and "officially" recognized "googolism's" (names for large numbers). More than this Andre Joyce, set the tone of googology as a subject as whimsical, maddening and absurd as the numbers it explores. Coming from the school of absurdists known as the pataphysist's, he injected that same kind of controlled insanity, that same deliberate disdain for the "practical" to embrace the absurd and revel in "silliness", into the subject of large numbers. This tradition is carried on in the community in the practice of word-smithing strange, exotic, disturbing, ridiculous, sometimes humorous, names for some VERY large numbers.

Where as Andre Joyce introduced us to whimsical ways to name numbers, Bowers' did this and much more. Bowers' set the tone of googology as something systematic and progressive. One didn't just come up with names for numbers randomly, but rather systematically and sequentially. Inventing a name for progressively larger numbers, then coming up with a number to top all of those, and so on, ad infinitum. To this end Bowers' also devised his own systematic notation, giving it the designation BEAF, for Bowers' Exploding Array Function. Many of the conventions Bowers' established, such as gathering names into "groups", having names which were both systematic and sporadic, having hundreds of example numbers, and also having the means to generate many more by extending upon established patterns, are still in use today. It was Bowers' work, more than any other, which inspired the beginning of the googology community, as it's very first task was to gather and organize Bowers' work. In recent years there has been attempts in the community to diminish the significance of Bowers' work, and I myself have pointed out many errors in Joyce's work. Granted, both Andre Joyce's and Bowers' work have their shortcomings, but this is irrelevant in light of how formative they were to the communities early stages of development. Pioneers don't always come with the most refined revolutions. Their job is sometimes to just lay the foundational bricks, to provide the basic vision, upon which others may further develop and refine. Bowers and Joyce inspired a whole generation of imitators but it was the formation of the googology wiki to gather all these various works that was the pivotal moment that created the community.

Up until that point in late 2008 when the wiki was founded all that existed were personal websites on large numbers. There was no community hub for such a topic. Initially the Wiki was created as simply a way to gather the information of googology into a single place. Bowers' work played an important role in this precisely because his work was so sprawling in comparison to earlier works that it demanded to be categorized and organized in a wiki format. When that was combined with the works of Andre Joyce and other floatsam of large number lore, at last there was a one stop shop for "googology" to flourish and take root. This began slowly, but eventually it became the hub for discussions, and the place to go to present your own works in "large numbers". The wiki is probably also largely responsible for the popularizing of the term "googology".

Googology and the googology community is still frightfully obscure and non-mainstream. If you have somehow found yourself at this site on some god-foresaken lonely corner of the internet than you are one of the lucky ones. Despite some minor exposure the wiki remains only a few hundred users strong, and most of these are very inactive. Perhaps only a few dozen people in the entire world even identify as "googologists", present company included. And yet one senses that the momentum has picked up. Only a few years after the inception of the googology wiki, several foreign language counterparts rose up. Even more recently a japanese community of googologists, inspired by the emerging english speaking community, started making googolism's and systems and such. It may never be known for sure that something like this hasn't happened before, but I doubt it ever did. Googology, as we understand it today, as a subsisting idea sustained by an obscure but growing number of individuals across the globe, seems decidedly modern. Where we go from here is uncertain, but one thing is for certain, for googologist's the answer is clear, the only way is up...

Now that you have some background about googology and the googology community proceed to learn about the formation and purpose of this website...

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