Edward Kasner

Edward Kasner (April 2, 1878 – January 7, 1955) was an American mathematician best known for introducing the term googol for 10100. He was a Professor of Mathematics at Columbia University the first Jewish person appointed to a faculty position in the sciences at Columbia specializing in differential geometry. Kasner is also known for the Kasner metric and the Kasner polygon.

Biography Edward Kasner was born on April 2, 1878 in New York City to Fanny Ritterman and Bernard Kasner, Jewish Austrian immigrants. He was the sixth of eight children. He attended Public School 2 in Manhattan and the City College of New York from 1891 to 1896.

Kasner's 1899 PhD dissertation at Columbia University was titled The Invariant Theory of the Inversion Group: Geometry upon a Quadric Surface; it was published by the American Mathematical Society in 1900 in their Transactions. He was one of the first recipients of a doctorate in mathematics from Columbia. He spent 1899-1900 in Göttingen studying under Felix Klein and David Hilbert.

Googol and googolplex Kasner is perhaps best remembered today for introducing the term googol for 10100. In order to pique the interest of children, Kasner sought a name for a very large number: one followed by 100 zeros. On a walk in the New Jersey Palisades with his nephews, Milton (1911–1981) and Edwin Sirotta, Kasner asked for their ideas. Nine-year-old Milton suggested that term.

In 1940, with James R. Newman, Kasner co-wrote a non-technical book surveying the field of mathematics, called Mathematics and the Imagination . It was in this book that the term googol was first popularized:

The Internet search engine "Google" originated from a misspelling of googol, and the "Googleplex" (the Google company headquarters in Mountain View, California) is similarly derived from googolplex, 10 to the power of googol.

Works

Edward Kasner and James R. Newman, Mathematics and the Imagination, Tempus Books of Microsoft Press, 1989.