From 1,000,000 to Graham’s Number

I have a small fascination with large numbers. One night when I was in university and should have been studying, I went on the search for the largest number. That search lead me to Graham’s number, and ever since I have been enamored with just how inconceivably large it is.

Tim Urban sums up Graham’s number perfectly, with the best attempt I’ve seen to present the magnitude of it

Huge numbers have always both tantalized me and given me nightmares, and until I learned about Graham’s number, I thought the biggest numbers a human could ever conceive of were things like “A googolplex to the googolplexth power,” which would blow my mind when I thought about it. But when I learned about Graham’s number, I realized that not only had I not scratched the surface of a truly huge number, I had been incapable of doing so—I didn’t have the tools. And now that I’ve gained those tools (and you will too today), a googolplex to the googolplexth power sounds like a kid saying “100 plus 100!” when asked to say the biggest number he could think of.