Yesterday I talked a little about big numbers. Today Paste Magazine discusses what you can buy with Avatar’s earnings. I don’t know about you, but I’ll pass on the triple grande vanilla soy latte. Bring on the space expeditions!

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We don’t really stop to think of how big numbers are. Million dollar budget cuts. Trillions of dollars to implement a new program.
How much is that? I’ve never had anywhere near a million dollars, much less a trillion, and even with my math background, the concept of very large numbers is still mind-boggling sometimes. (Secretly, [...]

One of my friends sent me a link via Twitter this morning said it reminded her of me. The link in question showed math in photography, complete with equations. I know I’m not the only one guilty of tracing functions in the sky and in the nature. Who knew that someone approximated actual functions?

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Now for Cantor’s diagonal argument. Cantor showed that the natural numbers and the integers have the same cardinality, and even the natural numbers and the rational numbers. But what about the natural numbers and all the real numbers? Let’s say we wrote down the decimal representation of every single real number and corresponded them with [...]

Only in America would someone sue someone for over a billion trillion dollars. To be exact, we’re talking $1,784,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Kevin Houston of the University of Leeds is cited in the article as saying, “I don’t think the human brain is set to deal with those numbers.”
But are they? Mathematicians study the properties of not just [...]