Edward Kasner - Biography

Edward Kasner (April 2, 1878, NYC–January 7, 1955, NYC) (City College of New York 1897; Columbia University M.A., 1897; Columbia University Ph.D., 1900) who studied under Cassius Jackson Keyser, was a prominent American mathematician who was appointed Tutor on Mathematics in the Columbia University Mathematics Department. Kasner was the first Jew appointed to a faculty position in the sciences at Columbia University.

Kasner's Ph.D. dissertation was titled The Invariant Theory of the Inversion Group: Geometry upon a Quadric Surface; it was published by the American Mathematical Society in 1900 in their Transactions.

Googol

Kasner is perhaps best remembered today for introducing the term "googol." In order to pique the interest of children, Kasner sought a name for a very large number: one followed by a hundred zeros. On a walk in the New Jersey Palisades with his nephews, Milton (March 8, 1911 - Feb. 1981) and Edwin Sirotta, Kasner asked for their ideas. Nine-year-old Milton suggested "googol."

In 1940, with James R. Newman, Kasner co-wrote a non-technical book surveying the field of mathematics, called Mathematics and the Imagination (ISBN 0-486-41703-4). It was in this book that the term "googol" was first introduced:

Google

Kasner's number naming legacy includes technology unforeseen in his lifetime. The Internet search engine "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol", which refers to 10¹⁰⁰ (the number represented by a 1 followed by 100-zeros).

The "Googleplex" is the Google company headquarters, located at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California, near San Jose.

Googleplex is a play on words for googolplex, the name given by Kasner's nephew to a number with that many zeros that you get tired from counting. Kasner assigned it to the large number:

<math>\mbox{googolplex} = {10}^{\mbox{googol}} = {10}^{({10}^{100})} </math>

(the number represented by a 1 followed by a googol of zeros).

See also

• Kasner metric
• Kasner polygon

• Edward Kasner and James R. Newman, Mathematics and the Imagination, Tempus Books of Microsoft Press, 1989. ISBN 1556151047
• Douglas, Jesse (1958) Edward Kasner, A Biographical Memoir prepared for the National Academy of Sciences.

Footnotes

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External links

• History from the Google website