...that is, number with many digits...
I once heard /read that in India, it was the custom to separate
the digits of large numbers into groups of four, instead of
three, as we "Eurocentric" people do now.

As I'm sure at least some of you know, really-large numbers (such
as thousands of digits or more) are usually, if not always
printed in groups of five, separated only by spaces and line
breaks. Left to right, top to bottom, and turn the page...

Back in 1960, I was a computer technician, and the computer's
console showed binary numbers with three bits per column. That
made it very easy to quickly read the number in the lights in
octal (octonary), base 8. It was like this, where a O represents
lighted lamp (zero: no lights lit). Here are 1 through 7, all the
non-zero octal digits (sorry, you need a monospacing font...)

O O O O weight = 4
O O O O weight = 2
O O O O weight = 1

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Punched paper tape, depending on the scheme used, could also be
read by humans.

Before IBM (probably) defined the digits of base-16 (hexadecimal)
as 0, 1, .. 9, A, B, C, D, E, F, some mathematicians used
u, v, w, x, y, z (small letters) for the digits bigger than 9.
"Hex." written with small letters still looks odd to me; I used
it with capitals rather intensively in the past.

That same computer I mentioned used base-32 (duotricenary, pretty
sure) for paper tape encoding; no holes was 0, and the rest was
based on binary. Digits larger than 10 were letters of the
alphabet, in sequence, up to X, omitting O, I, Y, and Z.

(Really, my intent is not to "push the envelope" about what is a
writing system, as far as I can think of a way to do it; it only
seems that way, and I'm primarily a technical person.) ☺

Google: From "googol", the name given by a child (Edward Kasner's
daughter?), when asked what to call the number 1 followed by 100
zeros. From (iirc!) Mathematics and the Imagination, definitely
by Edw. Kasner and James Newman. Very "readable" book...
(ca. 1950?). (Googolplex: 1 followed by a googol zeros.)

Nicholas Bodley |@| Waltham, Mass.
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