Is this a big number?


Free-form entry eg: '125000km', '1.5 million inches', '$67bn', '45000000 AUD', 100years', '123456789', '1 trillion', '1.5e6', '25 million kg'

Getting to Grips with Big

Stop worrying and learn to love big numbers

Numb about Numbers?

In 1982 Douglas Hofstadter wrote about Number Numbness. We’re still befuddled in the face of millions and billions, let alone trillions or even bigger numbers.

That’s the reason for IsThatABigNumber.com: to help anyone develop their number sense by putting big numbers in context and providing meaningful comparisons.

http://www.andrewcaelliott.com/explorations/2016/1/13/is-that-a-big-number

For the Love of Numbers

Number-led writings for the truly geeky

Benford’s Brain-boggling Law

Take a set of numbers collected from “the wild”.  You might take company profits, city population statistics, street numbers or odometer readings.  How many of the numbers in your set start with “1″? how many with “2″? with “3″?, “4″? …

Amazing as it sounds, these leading digits are NOT evenly distributed but follow a pattern (30% “1″s, down to less than 5% “9″s). This pattern is so reliable, it’s been used in fraud detection, to trap companies cooking their books: the invented numbers did not follow Benford’s Law.

Follow the link for a fascinating explanation of why this is so.

http://datagenetics.com/blog/march52012/index.html

Is That A Big Number? - The Book

Yes, there's now a book based on these numbers. Oxford University Press: July 2018.

Click here to learn more about it.

Click here for Podcast: Andrew Elliott interviewed for New Books Network.

http://itabn.tumblr.com/post/138631317782/this-website