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

Cosmic Eye: Powers of Ten

This video recreates the classic “Powers of Ten” film, zooming out to larger and larger scales to the limits of our understanding of the universe, and then zooming in again, down to the smallest things we know about.

It’s an excellent way of illustrating relative magnitudes of distance. One gripe: it all happens a bit too quickly: try watching it at half speed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfSNxVqprvM

Landmark Numbers

Prominent and memorable numbers

Stand on Zanzibar

Stand on Zanzibar is a 1968 science fiction novel by John Brunner. It takes its name from the author’s projection that by 2010, if all the world’s population stood shoulder to shoulder, the island of Zanzibar could accommodate them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_on_Zanzibar

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

The book is now out! Published 12 July 2018, it's chock full of numbers and stories about numbers and ways to think about BIG numbers.

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