The contest has ended. We were extremely delighted by the multitude of very original and clever submissions, and hope that you had as much fun thinking of larger and larger numbers as we had in musing over your submissions! Here are all the submissions, sorted in several categories to eye-ball their size. Within a category, the submissions are sorted alphabetically by author name.
Currently there are 169 submissions.
The contest ends on Day 3 (Friday) at 23:59 Hamburg local time. (Late submissions might be considered, but we can't promise that.) The winner is whoever submits the largest number. They are awarded 1000 bars of chocolate, divided by their winning entry. In case of a tie, the prize is shared. Additionally there will be a nerdy consolation prize for every participant.
The winner will be announced on this page and in the talk on large numbers, very large numbers and extremely large numbers. (That talk will also show you how to win this contest.)
Submissions may be in English or German. The only requirement is that the description can be expected to be understood by a working mathematician and objectively determines a unique (finite) positive natural number.
Hence submissions such as 6.28
, infinity
,
ω
(this refers to the first infinite ordinal
number), ε0
(this refers to a higher infinity than
ω – you'll enjoy the talk on infinite numbers if you're intrigued by
this notion) and this large number I was just thinking of
are
disqualified.
Examples for valid submissions are: 47
, the number of assemblies
as listed on the 37c3 wiki
, 999*999
. None of these examples is
particularly large, you can surely do better. :-)
You may use arbitrary technical terms and constructions in your description, as long as we will be reasonably able to look up their definitions on Wikipedia or in the mathematical literature. Your description may include pseudocode or code in a real programming language of your choice which would compute the large number you mean (if executed on a hypothetical computer with enough memory).
You can team up with your friends. Simply enter all your names or a team name.
After submitting an entry, you can edit your entry as often as you wish. You may also submit entirely new entries. If you make multiple submissions, the largest one counts.
It's easy to denial-of-service the server. Please don't do it. :-)
Enjoy your time on 37c3! In case of questions, don't hesitate to contact us by mail or by by phone or to drop by our assembly.
Impressum: Ingo Blechschmidt