Let's go back to 5000 to 8000 years ago. At this time, the four ancient civilizations have already transitioned from matriarchal society to paternal society. The development of productive forces has led to the emergence of prototype countries, and the expansion of production scale has stimulated people's demand for a large number. For example, if a primitive country organizes an army, His Majesty the King can't say, "My invincible army has nine soldiers!" As a result, symbols of "ten", "hundred", "thousand" and "ten thousand" appeared slowly. On the Shang Dynasty Oracle Bone Inscriptions in China, there is an inscription that "2,656 people were allowed to go to war on the 8th of 1911", that is, 2,656 people were destroyed on the 8th of 1911. Some large numbers were also engraved on bronzes in Shang and Zhou Dynasties. Then "100 million" appeared.

In ancient Rome, the largest unit of counting was only "thousand". They use m for 1000. "3 thousand" is written as "hmm" "Ten thousand" had to be written as "mmmmmmmm". I can't imagine what they would do if they had to remember 10 million. Why not write 10 thousand m's?

In a word, it took people a lot of brains to find a unit to remember large numbers. In the old society, when studying in a rural private school, a private school teacher told them, "The largest number is called monkey somersault." This private school teacher may think that the distance of a somersault in the Monkey King is the farthest and can't be further, so "monkey somersault" can be used to represent the maximum number. In ancient India, after using a series of large number units,

However, there was a great scholar in ancient Greece who counted "the number of sand full of the universe", that is Archimedes. He wrote a paper called "The Method of Counting Sand". In this article, his counting method is very similar to the method of expressing large numbers in modern mathematics. He started with the largest number unit in ancient Greece and introduced a new number "100 million" as a second.

Aristakes, a contemporary astronomer of Archimedes, once calculated that the distance from the earth to the celestial sphere is10000000 stadim (1stadim =188m), which is of course much smaller than the universe we know now. This is just the distance from the sun to Saturn. Archimedes assumed that the "universe" was full of sand. Then he began to count the amount of sand. Finally, he wrote: "It is obvious that the number of sand grains that can be loaded in the celestial sphere calculated by Aristakes will not exceed10 million eighth-order units." If you want to write down the number of sand, it is 65,438+00,000,000× (65,000× 000) 7 or you should write it in 1: 1, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Now, we can further extend this method to remember any number. For example, 32,000,000 can be recorded as 3.2× 107, and 0.00000032 can be recorded as 3.2× 10-6. This method is used between 1 and 10.