Getting to Grips with Big

How to 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=jfSNx...

Habits of Highly Mathematical People

This thought-provoking blog post accurately describes one of the most important reasons for mathematical (and other) education: for the habits of thought and not always only for the content.

Numeracy, and a numerate approach to understanding the world, becomes a habit also. Keep asking: “is that a big number?”

https://medium.com/@jeremyjkun/habits...

Gun Deaths In America

Powerful infographic from the FiveThirtyEight.com website (to whom all respect for numbers-led analysis and comment). Gives the question some context and perspective. And #ContextMatters. (Red dots are suicides, blue are homicides, yellow are accidents)

Overall, 33,000 people a year die from shootings in the USA. That IS a big number.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/g...

/./itabn/compare?number=33000

Numbers Astronomical and Beyond

IsThatABigNumber.com is about extending our number sense. We make comparisons that are (mostly) down-to-earth: populations of people and animals, national budgets, river lengths and so on.

But when we leave behind everyday experience and look at the kind of numbers you find in astronomy and in combinatorics, we come across vastly bigger numbers.

One strategy to grasp these numbers is to break them down into a series of levels, to see them as stupidly big aggregations of things that are themselves stupidly big aggregations of …  Here are some good clips illustrating this:

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T69cg...

Talking about Numbers

The whole point of ThatABigNumber.com is to make numbers easy to grasp, so it needs a way of talking about numbers that is both precise and close to our natural way of expressing ourselves.

This article explains the thinking behind the choices we made.

http://www.andrewcaelliott.com/explor...

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/explor...