Our monkey brains didn’t evolve to understand big numbers without some help. So when you run into an abstract figure, it’s good to have some real-world thing to compare it to. That’s why I memorize a ...

This video breaks down how scientists and economists use very large numbers, with clear examples from astronomy, mathematics, and modern wealth statistics to make scale easier to understand. Florida’s ...

Imagine a horizontal line. The very left is marked one thousand and the very right is marked one billion. On this line, where would you add a marker to represent one million? If you said somewhere in ...

Multiplying 2 x 2 is easy. But multiplying two numbers with more than a billion digits each — that takes some serious computation. The multiplication technique taught in grade school may be simple, ...

Seven minutes is all it took for a cyber attack to cripple thousands of companies in 2017. That’s according to a new Symantec marketing campaign which references the NotPetya malware attack that ...

The law of large numbers describes how the results of an experiment will get closer to the expected value if a person repeats it a significant number of times and calculates an average. It bears some ...

From the grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth to the number of stars in the sky, our universe is teeming with big numbers. Miles beneath our feet, there could lie a quadrillion tons of diamonds.