"I ate some fruits harvested from TREE(3)s together with some Graham's number crackers, and dipped them in some delicious guapamonga. This was all on a plate with a drawing of Tethrathoth. All of a sudden, my friend struck a gongulus. It hurt our ears as if Godsgodgulus was screaming at us. Fortunately, Big Boowa came to rescue us, and snatched the gongulus and replaced it with a much more tolerable googolgong."
—cookiefonster, April 2014 (source)
Welcome to Pointless Large Number Stuff, a website that covers two main topics: numbers in general and very large numbers, my goal being to give a web-book style comprehensive coverage of the topics (particularly the latter) useful for newcomers and experts alike. If you're new to large numbers or this site, read the introduction for more on the purpose of this site and how it is intended to be read.
This site was founded on May 28, 2014 and was updated regularly until February 2016, but I eventually became bored of googology due to lack of activity in the community, and the site lay mostly dormant for years since. However, in April 2022, I started working on updating some of this site's content while moving it over to the new Google Sites. The updates to the site are currently ongoing!
If you want to see the old version of this site using the old Google Sites layout, I have good news: every single page is on the Wayback Machine! I know many people are averse to when websites change their layout, and I sometimes am too, but I tried my best to make this site look presentable on the move to the new Google Sites.
Read the introduction if you're new to large numbers or this site.
SECTION I: Basic Numbers, -illions, and Astronomical Magnitudes
Let's begin our journey through the large numbers with the numbers that we use in daily life, and then some larger numbers that we sometimes see in science. Additionally, we'll examine how people have stretched the names used in the English language to outrageous heights.
SECTION II: Recursion and Common Notations
In this section, we learn about the popular tools for making numbers much larger than those we learned about in section 1, like Knuth's up-arrows or Conway's chain arrows, which transcend almost all practical use except for exotic corners of mathematics. We'll also learn the true stories behind famous large numbers you may have heard of like Graham's number.
SECTION III: Hierarchies, Arrays, and Hydras
In this section, we go beyond the popular large numbers discussed in section 2, to explore some much lesser-known and much more interesting googology. This is where googology as we know it really begins: serious attempts to explore the best ways to make large numbers, rather than just coming up with some numbers that are really big by most people's standards and calling it a day.
Section 3.1: Googological Notations Part 1
Section 3.2: Googological Notations Part 2 (planned)
Section 3.3: Fast-Growing Sequences in Googology (currently only introduction)
SECTION L: The Pointless Gigantic List Database
This is the supplemental section of my site, devoted to lists of anything related to googology. The main list is the multi-part Pointless Gigantic List of Numbers (PGLN for short), and other lists include a timeline of large numbers, a list of infinite numbers, and a list of large number functions.
A few times on this site, I have written joke articles, typically for a holiday like April Fools Day or whatever else. Please don't take the content in any of them seriously.
2/18/2025: New announcement about the plans I have for this site in 2025. I have several new articles that I hope to create this year!
2/17/2025: Completed an unfinished article from 2015! I'm talking about the Hyper-E article, which goes into detail on Sbiis Saibian's Hyper-E and Extended Hyper-E notation! Previously the article only consisted of the first third, an overview of his childhood poly-cell notation. Over the past week, I wrote the rest of the article. In the future, I plan to write an article diving into the Hyper-E and Extended Hyper-E googolisms.
2/11/2025: Four changes to my number list:
Fixed up the formatting in PGLN2 up to the end of the Stellar Range (before 10^30).
Added a few new entries slightly above a googol and above a googolgong generated using four fours. More similar entries to come! (And added 720,720 to PGLN1).
Changed the boundary between PGLN2 and PGLN3 from 10^10^1,000,000 to 10^10^100, a googolplex. I made this change because I found the old boundary unintuitive and felt using an iconic googolism as a dividing line made more sense.
Previously the parts of the number list were named The Tiny Dust Bits, The Little Babies, The Friendly Preliminaries, The Bigger Intermediates, The Higher Giants, The Mighty Royals, and The Elder Gods. Now they're called The Tiny Dust Bits, The Innocent Babies, The Humble Peasants, The Righteous Soldiers, The Fearsome Commanders, The Mighty Royals, and The Elder Gods.
2/6/2025: Added a few new entries to PGLN1 related to the four fours puzzle. Just search for "four fours" on the page and you'll find them. I'm surprised I never tackled this topic on my list before! Well, I actually did, but only as a side note in the entry for 4^^4.
6/22/2024: Here's something exciting: I completely redesigned part 1 of my number list! I'm really pleased with the new look I came up with for the list and I hope you guys enjoy it too. I heavily revised and updated the entries in my list and even added some new ones like 1601, 12,069, and 58,008. Next order of business: fixing all the links to other entries so that they actually work. Then onwards I will go to part 2 of the list.
6/16/2024: Updated the formatting of my non-positive number list! This is the design style I plan on doing for my entire number list, but man will it be tedious. It should be fun revising old entries and adding new ones though. I added a fun little entry for negative zero. Also my site has a favicon now: a cookie shaped like a P.
OLDER UPDATES... / ANNOUNCEMENT ARCHIVE
If you're wondering about who exactly wrote this site, read below.
I am a human male living in Ohio, USA, born April 3, 1999, who identifies on the Internet under the screen name cookiefonster. In real life, I work in software development and extensively make and perform music as a hobby. At the time I regularly updated this website, I specialized mainly in two fields: mathematics and music. Both fields have interested me since childhood, the latter of which I've worked with especially much in recent years. Since then, I've branched out into studying linguistics and computer science. These days, in my free time I like to read things online that interest me, make music and videos (largely involving Internet memes), and sometimes work on ambitious projects in a similar vein to this one.
As a child I was never very interested in large numbers; I did not really get into large numbers until late 2013, after googling the -illions due to boredom. This led me to discover Googology Wiki (of which was for quite a while a regular contributor) and learn about large numbers. On May 28, 2014, I decided to launch this website. It started as a random website with just some random large number stuff on it (hence the name of the site), although I soon got rather carried away with this project and it grew into a serious attempt to cover any and all large numbers. To this day, I am impressed with myself that I maintained something so ambitious that got to a pretty far degree.
Here I will share links to anything on the Internet that I find noteworthy that relate to large numbers.
Sbiis Saibian's Large Number Site (One to Infinity: A Guide to the Finite) - This is Sbiis Saibian's large number site, by far the biggest inspiration for this website. It is a web-book under construction that gives a detailed and thorough review of numeral systems, large numbers in the real world, functions that generate googologically large numbers, and more, and like my site it's designed to be a googology resource for newcomers and "experts" alike. Perhaps the most notable thing there is his own Extensible-E notation for making large numbers, where he names over 15,000 googolisms!
Googology Wiki - This is a wiki and forum dedicated to large numbers that anyone can contribute to, founded by Nathan Ho. It's how I myself discovered the wonderful world of googology. The wiki has pages about numbers, large number functions, people, and some concepts. It's also a great hub for people in the googology community to chat about googology, share their own large numbers, and analyze/formalize systems.
Notable Properties of Specific Numbers - A very long list of numbers sorted by size, by Robert Munafo. It lists any and all kinds of numbers with interesting properties, ranging from purely numeric properties to numbers like 42 or 666 with huge significance to human culture. The list of numbers only goes up to Steinhaus's mega, but he discusses far larger numbers in his large numbers site. It's a major part of the inspiration for my own list of numbers.
Robert Munafo's Large Numbers - This is the part of Robert Munafo's website where he describes various large numbers and ways to notate them. It is one of the very first serious coverages of large numbers ever created on the Internet! He goes over large numbers and ways to denote them in order of size in a way accessible to the layman. Unlike Sbiis Saibian's long articles, this website's information is presented quite concisely.
If you have questions or comments about this site, or would like to point out a mistake I made, feel free to email me! If you found a mistake in my site, don't be afraid to tell me, since I want it to be technically accurate. Disclaimer: I won't be able to answer most questions about higher-level googology, since my knowledge isn't as sharp as it used to be. My address is:
cookiefonster99 [at Google's mail domain]
Alternately, you can contact me on Discord (@cookiefonster) if you so prefer.
If you're curious about some of the other works I've put out on the Internet, you can click "MORE LINKS..." above.