About Author

Who am I? I'm an American born amateur mathematician and philosopher, and an active member of the so called "googology community". Online I go by the alias Sbiis Saibian, or more recently Sbiis.ExE. "Sbiis" is a meaningless name I invented by typing random letters on a keyboard one day. In day to day life I'm just an ordinary college student. I am employed as a mathematics tutor and workshop leader at the college I attend; a convenient line of work since it means the place I work is exactly the same place I attend school. Currently I am working towards getting an associates degree in computer science.

When I'm not preoccupied with school or work I like creating art, music, stories, and even games, purely for personal entertainment (my avatar above, that I have used as my moniker, is an example). I also like mathematics and am an amateur of sorts, having developed some of my own mathematics systems, notations, and proofs. I can attest that mathematics and creativity are not mutually exclusive. A mathematician is above all else, a creative problem-solver and idea-smith.

On the internet I'm a self-styled megalo-arithmologist, a person who studies the art, science, and theory of generating large finite numbers. megalo-arithmos is greek for "large numbers". It's a term I coined for a somewhat difficult to define amateur field, commonly called googology (from "googol" the quintessential large number, but more on that later). It can be thought of as a branch of mathematics whose primary goal is to generate, compare and name finite numbers as large as we can formally define.

I first became interested in large numbers in grade school when I learned about infinity and scientific notation (neither from grade school oddly). In an unconventional bout of childish revelry, I embarked on an epic thought experiment: I was going to be the first to "reach" infinity by imagining a finite number so large that it was exactly equal to infinity! The rules were simple: I could not envoke the infinite to reach the infinite. That would be cheating. That's impossible of course, but I was a stubborn kid who refused to just accept conventional wisdom without proving it to myself first. I may not have reached infinity but an interesting by-product of my experiment was some really massive large numbers that I had never seen or heard of before in my life, not from any book or adult!

Since then mathematics has always been my favorite subject, but I didn't return to the subject of large numbers in earnest until about 2004. It was then that I first scoured the internet to find information on large finite numbers to see if anyone else had explored the subject. I was surprised to learn that megalo-arithmology is "older than dirt" so to speak, and there have been several notations designed specifically with large numbers in mind going at least as far back as Archimedes in the 3rd Century B.C. Within the last 200 years or so however, with the advent of the computer, there has been something of a large number renaissance with a proliferation of ever more powerful notations being developed all the way to the present!

What I discovered in late 2004 however was that this information was scattered across the internet and that there were no websites devoted exclusively to the subject (with a rare exception being Robert Munafo's Site and Jonathan Bowers' 2002 Site). So in December of 2008 I decided to launch my own Large Site which would do just that! Since then I have been expanding and improving my Large Number Site and have no plans of stopping any time soon ...

To learn more about googology proceed to the next section in the information desk...

NEXT>> About Googology