Edward Kasner

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Edward Kasner (1878–1955) was a prominent American mathematician, best remembered today for popularizing the term googol.

Kasner studied at Columbia University under Cassius Jackson Keyser. He received his Ph.D. in 1899; his dissertation was titled The Invariant Theory of the Inversion Group.

Around 1920, in order to pique the interest of children, Kasner wanted a catchy name for a very large number: one, followed by a hundred zeros. On a walk in New Jersey's Palisades with his nephews, Milton (c. 1911–1980) and Edwin Sirotta, Kasner asked for their ideas. Nine-year-old Milton suggested "googol". The Internet search engine Google was named as a play on the number googol. Kasner also coined the term "googolplex" for the number written as one followed by a googol zeros; the Google offices are called Googleplex for this reason.

In 1940, with James Roy Newman, Kasner authored a semi-popular book surveying the entire field of mathematics called Mathematics and the Imagination ISBN 0-486-41703-4. It was in this book that the term "googol" was introduced.

[edit] References

Kasner, Edward [1934] (1980). “Differential-geometric aspects of dynamics”, C.Carpelan, A.Parpola P.Koskikallio (ed.): The Logarithmic potential and other monographs. New York: Chelsea, pp. 235-263. ISBN 0-8284-0305-8.
Kasner, Edward, Newman, James Roy [London: Penguin, 1940; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967] (April 2001). Mathematics and the Imagination. Dover Pubns. ISBN 0-486-41703-4.
Kasner, Edward (1921). "Geometrical theorems on Einstein's cosmological equations". Amer. J. Math. 43: 217.
Bialik, Carl (June 14 2004). "There Could Be No Google Without Edward Kasner". The Wall Street Journal Online.