I was thinking about Dr. Evil this morning, and how when he woke up after 30 years of suspended animation, he threatened the world, demanding: “One Million Dollars!” Ha ha ha ha! (<Evil laugh. Or would that be Moo Hoo Ha Ha!?, or simply: Mwa Ha Ha!? Oh, never mind.)
So anyway, this reminded me of how, when I was in elementary school, in about second grade, I got into some argument with a very smart girl about what the largest number is. I said it was infinity, and she said that, no, it was a gloogloo. (We were about 8 years-old, I think, at this time, and this was in the day before you could just look it up on your smartphone over the internet, you cheaters.) So I said that I thought there was no bigger number than infinity, since it was a 1 with an endless number of zeros. So she countered that a gloogloo was bigger, because it was: “one bigger than that: however big infinity is, add one to it and that’s a gloogloo!”
Okay, so I thought she was either just making that up to be contrary or difficult, or she just didn’t know what she was talking about. But then, later, I found out about a number called a googol, which is an actual real large number. It is, however, only a 1 with 100 zeros, which however large that is, is still quite a lot smaller than infinity. In fact, infinity is practically infinitely larger than a googol (minus, a googol, that is, just to be exact)! So I win the decades-old argument! Ha ha, whatever her name was! I was right, and you even got the name of your number wrong: it’s a googol, not a gloogloo! This proves once and for all that boys are better than girls at math!
I’m kidding, ladies! We were both woefully uninformed little kids at the time, and I just got lucky knowing about infinity because I watched science-fiction movies. But I was surprised to find out later that there was such a number as a googol, and even more-so to find even later still that the world’s most popular internet search engine was named after it, although spelled wrong. Which, of course could only mean one thing: that little girl grew up to found Google! (Sure, people say it was founded by two guys, but hey: maybe she thought the name up, or perhaps they had the same argument with her as kids that I had, and they remembered it just like I did!)
In any case, I remember that in that same argument, I postulated (there’s a math term for children!) that if infinity were made up of all 9s, rather than a 1 with a bunch of zeros, it would have to be bigger, and then if you added one to that, it really would make an even larger number that was theoretically larger than infinity. And, naturally, that’s when she said that’s what a gloogloo was, and that’s what she meant all along. Oh, kids: I hope this type of innocently misinformed pomposity and stubbornness are not lost to the ages with the advent of smartphones and at-your-fingertips encyclopedic information! Because then, only adults would do it! (And that’s not nearly as cute!)
So, anyway, in honor of this little stubborn factually-challenged girl, I propose we do something to make her right after all these years! That’s right: We need to create a new imaginary number called “a gloogloo”, which is one added to an infinity’s-worth of nines, creating a number that is truly “one more than infinity” (if infinity was composed of all nines). All the dead mathematicians demand it: They told me in a dream! And if we don’t, they said they’d make us all have to do a gloogloo word problems after we die!
