The local mall fills a van with jelly beans and holds a contest to see who can gues the number of jelly beans in the van. The Greek mathematician Archimedes offeres a strategy to solve this sort of problem 2300 years ago. In doing so, he also introduced the use of exponents to decribe large numbers. Instead of counting the jelly beans in a van, Archimedes tried to count the grains of sand that would fill the universe. First he estimated the number of grains of sand it would take to fill a small seed, then he estimated how many times that seed would fit within a man's finger, and how many fingers would fill up a room, and so on. When his calculations were complete, he had underestimated the size of the universe, but had arrived at the largest number yet comprehended. To describe this enormous value, he employed exponents. We see a modern form of this notation in scientific notation. For example, the volume of the Earth is more than 1 x 1021, or 1 with 21 zeros following it. Dec. 2005Previous Math History
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