Nationality American Name Edward Kasner | Role Mathematician | |
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Born April 2, 1878New York City, United States ( 1878-04-02 ) Alma mater Columbia University (MA PhD) Doctoral students John De CiccoRufus IsaacsJoseph RittJesse DouglasEdna Kramer Books Mathematics and the Imagination, Math Imagination Similar People James R Newman, David Hilbert, Felix Klein, Jesse Douglas | ||
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Edward Kasner (April 2, 1878 – January 7, 1955) was a prominent American mathematician who was appointed Tutor on Mathematics in the Columbia University Mathematics Department. Kasner was the first Jew appointed to a faculty position in the sciences at Columbia University. Subsequently, he became an adjunct professor in 1906, and a full professor in 1910, at the university. Differential geometry was his main field of study. In addition to introducing the term "googol", he is known also for the Kasner metric and the Kasner polygon.
Contents
Kasner's PhD dissertation 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.
Googol and googolplex
Kasner is perhaps best remembered today for introducing the term "googol." In order to pique the interest of children, Kasner sought a name for a very large number: one followed by a hundred zeros. On a walk in the New Jersey Palisades with his nephews, Milton (born 1911) and Edwin Sirotta, Kasner asked for their ideas. Nine-year-old Milton suggested "googol."
In 1940, with James R. Newman, Kasner co-wrote a non-technical book surveying the field of mathematics, called Mathematics and the Imagination (ISBN 0-486-41703-4). It was in this book that the term "googol" was first introduced:
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.