May 29, 2026
Big Number Energy
Notable Properties of Specific Numbers
Math nerds lose it over giant weird numbers, chess chaos, and a Simpsons flex
TLDR: A roundup of bizarre famous numbers has people obsessing over everything from chess counts to giant primes and a sneaky Simpsons math joke. The biggest reaction wasn’t just awe — it was a full-on nerd scrum over which numbers are cool history and which ones are technically bogus.
A delightfully unhinged corner of the internet is buzzing over a page that basically asks: what if numbers had celebrity gossip pages? The list jumps from a monster value built from a famous physics constant, to an old estimate for the number of chess positions, to a giant prime found on a desk calculator in 1951, to a near-miss equation sneaked into The Simpsons, and even the mind-melting number of ways to scramble a 4x4x4 Rubik’s Cube. For non-math people, it’s less “homework” and more “here are some absurdly huge numbers with wild backstories.”
But the real fireworks are in the reactions. The strongest opinion by far? Chess people and math people immediately started arguing. One camp loved the old-school Shannon estimate as a cool historical artifact; the other camp pounced on the page’s own warning that it’s inaccurate, basically saying, “Congrats, you counted impossible pawn positions.” That kicked off the classic internet mini-war between “close enough for intuition” and “if it’s wrong, don’t glamorize it.” Meanwhile, everyone else latched onto the funniest bits: that a mechanical calculator once helped set a prime number record, that Chinese has a named number for 10^44, and that The Simpsons once casually hid a famous almost-counterexample to Fermat’s Last Theorem like it was an easter egg for sleep-deprived geniuses. The vibe in comments? Equal parts awe, nitpicking, and “humanity was a mistake, but in a charming way.”
Key Points
- •The page catalogs notable numbers between about 10^41 and 10^45, giving each number’s mathematical form and significance.
- •One entry defines 1.786266437(26)×10^41 as 2 raised to the reciprocal fine-structure constant using the CODATA 2022 value, noting its proximity to the Dirac ratio 10^40.
- •A corrected Shannon-style estimate for the number of possible chess positions is given as about 1.15868×10^42, along with reasons the formula is inaccurate and a note that John Tromp produced a better estimate.
- •The article includes historical number theory examples, including a 44-digit prime found by Ferrier in 1951 and the smallest prime of the form n·2^n+1, namely 141·2^141+1.
- •Later entries cover a lower bound for BB(8) from Milton Green and the approximately 7.40119×10^45 possible arrangements of a 4×4×4 Rubik’s Cube.