Pauli

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:08 PM -0500 1/30/11, Shapiro, Fred wrote:
>I went back and looked at my old postings, and I see that I actually
>antedated "googol" and "googolplex" to 1937.  Also, note that
>Sirotta's year of birth is disputed.
>
>Fred Shapiro

Well, when you're playing around with numbers on the order of 1
followed by 100 zeros (a.k.a. ten duogrigintillion), what's a year or
two either way in calculating the age of a young nephew?

LH

>
>
>
>________________________________________
>From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
>Shapiro, Fred [fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU]
>Sent: Friday, January 28, 2011 2:10 PM
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>Subject: Re: Pauli
>
>As I have posted before on this list, the first known usage of
>"googol" in print was in Jan. 1938.  So probably Sirotta coined the
>term before 1938.
>
>Fred Shapiro
>
>
>
>________________________________________
>From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
>Arnold Zwicky [zwicky at STANFORD.EDU]
>Sent: Friday, January 28, 2011 11:08 AM
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>Subject: Re: Pauli
>
>On Jan 28, 2011, at 7:40 AM, Jon Lighter wrote:
>>
>>  I read the same book [by George Gamow] when I was twelve. And I
>>remember the "googol" thing.
>>  But he didn't attribute it to his nephew.
>>
>>  BTW, acc. to Google Books the passage doesn't exist.  Like the square root
>>  of -1.
>
>right kind of story, but wrong source: the wikipedia entry says:
>
>The term was coined in 1938 by 9-year-old Milton Sirotta
>(1929-1981), nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner. Kasner
>popularized the concept in his book Mathematics and the Imagination
>(1940).
>
>amz
>
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