There are so many numbers it is hard to imagine.

Mathematicians have also described numbers that are larger than a googolplex. Graham’s number is perhaps the most well-known.

It was first proposed by Ronald Graham, a mathematician. It was proposed by Ronald Graham to solve a problem in Ramsey theory, a branch of mathematics that deals with finding order in chaos.

Although it’s difficult to understand the math behind it, it’s important to know that creating it requires exponentiation in a truly mind-shattering way. Graham explains the reasons in this video for Numberphile’s mathematics YouTube channel.

You should also be aware that even if your goal was to write it down on paper there is not enough space in the visible Universe for it to fit.

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But what about infinity? For the average person, infinity seems a straightforward concept – it’s not a number, rather something that goes on forever. It is not clear, however, if the human mind can truly understand it.

Edmund Burke, a philosopher and writer from the 1700s, wrote that infinity “has a tendency to fill one’s mind with that kind of delightful horror which is the most authentic effect and truest measure of the sublime”. Burke believed that the concept evoked a mix of fear and astonishment; pleasure and pain at the same time. It was rare that anyone would ever see it in the real world, except in their imaginations, and even then, they couldn’t really know.

The logician Georg Cantor made the concept of infinite more mind-bending in the next century. He demonstrated that some infinities are greater than others.

How is this possible? It is easy to understand why by imagining the set all the even numbers. This would be infinite, wouldn’t it? But it must It is smaller than the total set of all whole numbers because it does NOT contain the odd numbers. Cantor demonstrated that these sets have numbers that do not match each other, so there must be multiple sizes.

It is difficult to understand, let alone to picture this, but it is what happens to the mind when it attempts to deal with mathematical enormity. These huge numbers are much more difficult to comprehend than anything a 10-year old me could have imagined.

*Richard Fisher is a senior journalist for BBC Future. Twitter: @rifish

ChatGPT was used by the author to find trusted sources and calculate portions of this story.

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