Int-En: Naming all the numbers

Can you count forever? What's the biggest named number you can think of? Is it a trillion? A quintillion?

In this post I present a tool which turns any* number into its English language form.

The naming mechanism originates from the first chapter of John Conway and Richard Guy's The Book of Numbers, where the authors examine this problem and propose a solution by extending the existing patterns to cover the gap from vigintillion (10⁶³) to centillion (10³⁰³) and beyond.

Visit my web app linked below to play with the space!

Integers to English

See American English forms of numbers, from the massively large to the inconceivably tiny

Peter Elmers

Conway and Guy both unfortunately passed away earlier this year, and I'm sharing their work in their memory.

Further Reading

Follow these links to learn much more about large numbers and their names.

• Sbiis Saibian has dedicated an entire chapter on their website to exploring the nature of names of large numbers, including a more detailed look at the construction introduced here: https://sites.google.com/site/largenumbers/home/2-4
• Robert Munafo has also authored an extensive catalog of known large numbers on his site. What I like most on this page is the short discussion of the history behind each class of number, well worth a read: https://mrob.com/pub/math/largenum.html

Notes

• *of course 'any' is a simplification (upper limit is presumably based on the number of bits Google app engine decides to allocate my server)
• And as usual the code is on GitHub: https://github.com/pelmers/int-en/blob/master/int2en/int2en.py