What is the largest number known to man?

Oh, for crying out loud! This question is nearly impossible to answer. I do know the answer, but as soon as I post it here, some wise cracker from someplace like Des Plaines, Illinois will add one, or even two to it, and BINGO, he/she will now have a larger number. I will tell you this, it begins with a nine, and no, it dosen't have ANY zeros in it. So, it isn't one those "followed by a zillion zeros" numbers.

It was an exciting time when numbers were first being invented. The current (base 10) Arabic numbers we use today, were not all invented at the same time. The three (3) was the first number to be created, then the 1, then the 8 and so on. People had little use for them until someone finally decided to put them in numerical order. After that, nearly everyone was using numbers, and they were the big rage. People would walk around counting everything they saw, and saying things like, "I've been using numbers for 4 days," to their friends.

The zero was very difficult to even comprehend back then let alone invent a way to represent it. Several early mathematicians did grasp the concept of zero, but they chose to represent it using nothing. The rest of the people never noticed it, so it wasn't until someone drew a "0" that it became a real number representing nothing. Nowadays, using modern computers, we can raise the lowly "0" to a value equal to that of a "1." Zeros can also be divided now, so one can have half-zeros, and quarter-zeros, but they are still of no real value.

Numbers almost became our alphabet, too. Numbers were created before letters (with the exception of "R" which was created by sheer accident during an alchemy experiment involving sodium carbonate, zinc and a chicken's foot), and were often used to represent words. For instance, the number 4 was used to represent the word souffle' until the early 1100's.

Roman numbers were actually slightly larger than our current Arabic numbers. A Roman numeral VIII (8) is actually worth 8.000021 Arabic. This has nothing to do with deflation after the fall or Rome. It is due to their inability to understand fractions, and that forced them to just round off each Roman numeral as it was created.

There is one very large number that is considered extremely risque by mathematicians who understand such complex numbers. I'm afraid I can't type it out here, because my blog would soon be shut down by the authorities, but I encourage you to search for it, if you like such things. I can't tell you exactly where to find it, but I will let you know it is fairly near 51,904,274,917,887,025,287,009,246,141.3290080034.

One last thing, if you read Dan Brown's book, for goodness sake, get on the internet and start Googling "phi" ( better known as the "golden ratio"). I guarantee you will learn more than I can teach you (today).