2009.08.11

2009.08.11 11:50 Tuesday

Future Plans for Section II

After many months of inactivity, I've finally added a new chapter ! I still want to try and finish section II. I plan to have 2 more chapters.

Chapter 3 will be a bit of an excursion, a chance to take it easy. It will go over some of the more famous history in regards to large numbers. The emphasis here is that numbers are sometimes purely imaginitive, and strictly impractical. This is in constrast to the first 2 chapters which plant numbers squarely within reality. But ultimately this website is concerned with numbers as abstractions, and so this chapter is actually going to be more in line with my main points. Basically I want chapter 3 to get people interested.

Chapter 4, will be the long promised chapter on the -illion series , and it will also be the close of Section II. I want to show people that even counting has it's limits. Numbers go beyond anything we can number. Mainly Chapter 4 is an extension of the idea of a "naming convention".

A lot of the obsessiveness with large numbers has to do with naming them. Many people seem to find this addictive. Type "googolplex" into a search engine and you'll see what I mean. However, it is not with naming the numbers that I am mainly concerned. All of this is really just a primer for what will follow.

I hope to finish Section II before 2009 ends, but that might not happen the way things are going. In any case, Section I & II are really just primers for Section III. This section will be where the discussion of large numbers really begins...

--Sbiis Saibian