“Number 54, the house with the bamboo door” is how an old song begins. Using a simple rhyme, these words make the obvious point that numbers carry information that can be verified. If the song did refer to a real house, one could visit it to find out if its number was 54 and if it actually had a bamboo door. If it did not, then the information was incorrect.
On the other hand, if there were houses with numbers such as 54A, 54B, 54C, etc., and only one of them had a bamboo door, then the information would have been incomplete and ambiguous. Finally, if the house, its number, and the bamboo door all existed only in the songwriter’s imagination, then the information would have been misleading.
This preamble was necessary because the song’s catchy tune and simple words have a fundamental message for today’s world. Numbers tell stories that have contexts. The information provided by numbers can be meaningful, trusted and relied upon only when there is factual evidence to back them up, and the context is kept in mind. In the absence of evidence, or taken out of context, they are mystifying and misleading.
The power of numbers to mystify or mislead must not be confused with their philosophical connotations. Philolaus, a pre-Socratic philosopher, said, “all things that can be known contain number; without this nothing could be thought or known.” The Indian mathematician Brahmagupta invented the zero in the seventh century to bring self-consistency in arithmetical manipulations. One does not know what he thought of its philosophical implications. Ramanujan, another great Indian mathematician, however, saw nothingness in zero — the manifestation of absolute reality in infinity — and opined that the product of zero and infinity gave all possible numbers.
Be that as it may, no matter how large a number is, by definition, it has to be less than infinity. Milton Sirotta, the nine-year-old nephew of Edward Kasner, a Professor of mathematics, knew this. In 1940, when asked by his uncle to name the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, he named it googol. He named another number (much larger than googol) googolplex, which is “one, followed by writing zeroes until you get tired.”
Both googol and googolplex are so large and so remote from our day-to-day life that they mystify us. Their two approximate namesakes, Google, the internet company, and Googleplex, the corporate headquarters complex of Alphabet, the company that owns Google, do the same, but for an ideology in which making a profit is of paramount importance. The public mystification began with the slight difference in the spelling of the number googol and that of the internet company. In 2004, apparently, Kasner’s heirs even considered suing Google over their play on the word “googol”, but no suit was eventually filed.
In that year, Google went public, and the Wall Street Journal described its initial public offering (IPO) as “the hottest of the year.” The IPO included a “Letter from the Founders” in its prospectus. It said, “Google is not a conventional company.” It did not intend to become one; it would continue to invest in risky projects and apparently took a pledge to be “an institution that makes the world a better place.” In short, Google promised to focus on long-term innovations rather than short-term profit.
By the end of 2010, Google’s average market valuation was about $ 2 billion. Over the next 15 years, a series of more mystifying large numbers followed. It became a one-trillion-dollar company at the beginning of 2020, a three-trillion-dollar company in September 2025, and, very recently, a nearly four-trillion-dollar company after the launch of Gemini 3 AI. The $3 trillion mark came after the antitrust action brought by the US regulators against Google failed in a US court.
According to a market analyst, the US court’s decision to hand over a victory in the antitrust motion was a “monster win” for Google and Apple, another technology giant. He is likely to be right, as there are reports of Apple partnering with Google to overhaul Siri using Google’s Gemini AI. Could it be that the win may well turn out to be temporary and remain limited within the US? A little demystification shows that this may well be so. Furthermore, it suggests a dangerous fragility in the global financial sector.
The demystification must start with a little background history. After the 2008 market crash, an astonishingly large number of big companies from the oil, pharmaceutical, finance, and automotive industries were found to have broken the law for short-term profit. In the internet sector, too, it was no different. Competition and long-term innovation were sacrificed for dizzying market valuations. More specifically, in the case of Google, once the interests of its advertisers and customers started to collide, the company’s focus was entirely on maximising short-term profits by operating within and manipulating legal loopholes to lord it over a monopoly market.
There are other, less publicised numbers which help the demystification further. The legal claims against Google are 3.5 billion and a staggering 20 decillion (2 followed by 34 zeros) US dollars, respectively, in Europe and Russia. The last number is smaller than googol but greater than the value of all the world’s financial assets combined. According to the Russian spokesperson, 20 decillion is a symbolic number in response to Google’s putting restrictions on Russian YouTube channels.
The word symbolic is significant in more than one way. His comments were made just before the 2024 US presidential election, and were very likely an oblique reference to the restructuring of global geopolitical and economic power centres. He probably did not think it necessary to point out the obvious fact that the valuation of Google or any other of the “Magnificent 7” companies is not immune to restructuring. The “Magnificent 7” – Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Tesla, Meta and Alphabet (Google’s owner) all have more than trillion-dollar valuations and constitute more than 30 per cent of the market capitalisation of the S&P 500.
He was proved right. Soon after, in January this year, the chip-making company Nvidia lost more than half a trillion dollars in one day, setting a record in stock market history. The drop, described as “Big Tech is eating itself alive” by an expert, was caused by the announcement of the arrival of Chinese AI Deep Seek, the top-rated free application that is likely to pose a significant challenge to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta AI. It is also widely perceived as a strategic threat to the US’s technological supremacy.
The demystification of numbers is necessary because it provides a historical perspective on the role of ideology in discussions of numbers related to societal matters, giving us a broader perspective. The well-known public quarrel between two Russian mathematicians, Nekrasov and Markov, in the early 20th century was all about what in statistics is called the “law of large numbers.” They differed eloquently in their interpretations of that law.
Nekrasov, a Professor at Moscow University, was unofficially called “The Tsar of probability”. He was a Tsarist, a deeply religious man, and to him, human free will was the manifestation of God’s will. Based on statistics, he argued that individual choices were independent, and therefore “independence is a necessary condition for the law of large numbers.”
Markov, on the other hand, was a socialist, an atheist, and had no patience for lack of rigour in mathematics. He listed Nekrasov’s views among what he called the abuses of mathematics. He was passionate about the social and educational issues of his time, wrote more than 20 letters to the newspapers, and, as a result, came to be called “Andrew the Furious” and “the militant academician” by the press.
He proved Nekrasov’s claim of “independence is a necessary…” to be wrong and showed that dependent events could also follow the same law. Markov’s contributions proved to be highly significant. Today, they have wide applications in economics, finance, genetics, weather forecasting, artificial intelligence, decision-making, etc. In fact, Gemini and all other large language models (LLMs) owe a great deal to what is called a Markov chain.
Had Markov been alive today, he would have explained the current restructuring of global geopolitical and economic power centres as one dependent event leading to another. He would not have explained it as free, independent, collective choices, and probably would have picked the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, when one nation became 15, including Ukraine, as the first event. The Wall Street crash in 2008 would have been the second, and the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2022 the third and final one.
He would have pointed out that the disintegration of the USSR gave an enormous boost to market theology until the Wall Street crash of 2008, which wiped out nearly $ 8 trillion in the US market and $ 10 trillion in home values and retirement benefits. He would have also pointed out that the pandemic killed millions of people, officially 7 million, but based on excess mortality, between 18 and 33.5 million. It exposed the hollowness of globalisation, the talks of international cooperation, innovation, and governance for the well-being of ordinary citizens.
Finally, he would surely have pointed out that we rely on numbers because they help us cope with reality. They play a pivotal role in science and technology, provide limited guidance for peering into the future, and enable us to make changes in our surroundings that improve our quality of life. The current fascination with mystifying, misleading numbers may be the zeitgeist—the spirit of our age —but, in uncertain times, the use of such numbers is an age-old technique of the ruling class to hide unpleasant truths and divert attention from hard problems.
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