10,973 Pages

Update 2019: At this point I've pretty much lost all interest in googology. I'm still interested in general mathematics, but extremely large numbers have just become monotonous for me.

born to terminate

world is a $$f_{\omega_1^\text{CK}}$$

I am googologist man

bio

I suppose I should introduce myself.

Hi, I'm ArtismScrub. I'm not a professional mathematician in any way, I'm just some random teen with some kind of autism that actually has an interest in math. Rare type, huh?

So, how I gained an interest in googology.

I always liked math.

As a very young child I used to think that no two math problems should be able to have the same solution, but that was a very naive belief. I don't know when exactly that was or how I got over it. I don't even remember it myself, but my mother tells me I used to believe such a thing.

I don't exactly remember how I came to learn basic math. I went into 2nd grade already knowing how multiplication, division, fractions, decimals and negative numbers worked, and apparently very few others did--they had only heard of whole numbers, addition and subtraction. I was like... how?? I tried to explain it to them, several times, but they couldn't remember.

Oh yeah, and I was the biggest mental case the school had probably ever seen. I just couldn't sit down, couldn't shut up. I remember one day I couldn't even keep my shirt on. To this day I have no idea exactly what was going on in my brain at the time. Now I'm fine.

Throughout the years, I came to learn even more diverse types of math, such as operations with rational non-integers, exponentiation, polynomials, geometric calculations, etc. and I currently excel in almost all of that. EDIT: Never mind, now I have to memorize the names of various theorems, and I can't even remotely do that.

But large numbers in particular interested me, however, I just didn't know it. I dabbled in incremental games such as Cookie Clicker and AdVenture Capitalist, and they somewhat satisfied me, but not enough. I watched a couple videos on the scale of the universe from the Planck length to the observable universe (and sometimes beyond that), and planned on making my own, but that seemed pointless. I felt there was something missing. Something more that lay beyond... but what?

Eventually, I came across a YouTube video by Vsauce called "How to Count Past Infinity". While trying to explain how large infinity is, he made up a number that went: "a googolplex factorial to the power of a googolplex to a googolplex squared... times Graham's number" (which, looking back at it, is a pretty bad salad number--oh look it just got its own article) and I was like... what's Graham's number? I had heard of the googol and googolplex, but not Graham's number. I shrugged and kept watching. Eventually, quite a while later, I decided to look up Graham's number. Numberphile has several videos on Graham's number--I clicked on one of them. I can't remember which.

I was appalled, to say the least. Before that I couldn't imagine such numbers so large that they couldn't be conceivably expressed with repeated exponentiation, and now I was introduced to this thing called up arrow notation that leaves exponentiation in the dust, and then this mighty number that can only just barely be expressed with THAT kind of notation!! It opened up a whole new world of numbers for me, only for me to look in the comments section and see mentions of EVEN LARGER numbers such as TREE(3) or Rayo's number. Like any transitioning layman, my first thought was something along the lines of GGGG...G64 with G64 Gs to create something comparable to those numbers (I later found out that such a number has been coined as "Hypergraham"). However, I later learned that any such iteration was naive and worthless compared to such high beasts.

Later on, I was introduced somehow to a website on Google Sites called Pointless Large Number Stuff. In it, I had learned a LOT of things about googology, most of which I didn't initially understand and a lot of which I still don't understand. I was also introduced to Sbiis Saibian's and Robert Munafo's number sites, and am currently making my own that I will release when I feel I've gotten enough done (aka probably never). All of my other googological memories are a bit of a blur.

When I made my first edits and blog posts and whatnot, I was very nervous, entering a new community like this, but I knew I was doing something good. Now, this feels rather normal, and I'm glad to be here.

Quotes

pls rember that wen u feel scare or frigten

never forget ttimes wen u feeled happy

wen day is dark alway rember happy day
—Anon #13888820
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.
—Winston Churchill
Look. If you had... one shot... or one opportunity... to seize everything you ever wanted, would you capture it... or just let it slip?
—Eminem

Quotes from vandal edits of my user page

born to block evade

world is a $$f_{\omega_1^\text{CK}}$$

I am Edwin man

410,757,864,530 proxies
—Various alt accounts of Edwin Shade

kept because this is frankly more clever than what i came up with myself

Hi! My name is ArtismScrub and I like sexual anime photos, 519 of which I keep in a computer stash. Oh boy - one time my Mom walked in on me and...well, that's a story for another time.
—NCBall Official 4.699 (alt of Shang Yang Yang)

kept because 519 is a hilarious underestimate