You Can’t Comprehend One Million

I can’t even remember his name but I sure can remember my high school algebra teacher acting like Jack Nicholson in a Few Good Men telling us we couldn’t handle a million. He had a reputation as a “Bonehead Math” expert and his recurring theme said the human brain cannot grasp the number 1,000,000. We were ignorant 10^th graders still stupid enough to fight back with grains of salt on a table, stitches on a tablecloth and stars in the sky, but in all cases he insisted we could not look at them all at once, or count them or ever know them all individually.

That was enough to get us started in an ongoing conversation outside the classroom as each student admitted their personal limit for comprehension, many liking the number 1,000 , some less but none more than 10,000 except the stubborn few who insisted we could make it all the way to the forbidden million mark. That was how I began my journey to prove I could get to one million by first counting up from 1 (always got lost somewhere in the 5,400’s,) then down from 1,000,000 (nightmares with flying 9’s) so I finally switched to writing on a page.

I started with the notion of writing all the numbers clear to a million but it didn’t take long to see that would be too much work. That’s when I realized I only needed a million digits and started over again with just one number repeated over and over again. I first used the number zero but I could only get about 5,000 per page and it is easier to write ones which almost tripled the output to around 12,000 numbers per page but when I went to the period I was able to get 20,000 characters per page which translates to only 50 pages as compared to 80 or 200 for the others. The period is not a technically a number but it is the decimal point so that’s close enough.

I will have to give that teacher credit for making me think big after all these years. but I still won’t admit he was right. We should all be allowed to think to a million and beyond. I can lay out those 50 pages of dots and visualize a million now and am ready to begin on a billion. It will take a while but at least I have something to look forward to.