Razgovor:Gugol

Year of coinage

(I do not speak Bosnian.) The word googol was coined before 1938. As Carl Bialik points out in the Wall Street Journal: “The date for that naming is widely given on Internet encyclopedias and in recent press coverage as the late 1930s, but Dr. Kasner's living relatives say it happened closer to 1920. Milton turned nine in that year, and family archives show Dr. Kasner began referring to the number in lectures soon afterwards.” Furthermore: “But Denise Sirotta says her father, Edwin, told her "he was asked for a word with a sound that had a lot of O's in it" -- just as googol had many zeros. Ms. Sirotta, 55 years old, adds that, according to her father, "They both came up with it. It's a sore point in my life that Milton gets the credit and my father doesn't get the credit."”

This fits to the birth dates of Milton and Edwin Sirotta as given by the Social Security Death Index (March 8, 1911 and July 11, 1915, respectively; last residence of both: NY). My interpretation is that the SSDI dates are accurate (and actually belong to Kasner’s nephews) while the traditional dates (about or exactly 1938 as the year of coinage, about or exactly 1929 as the year of Milton’s birth) are based on the year of publication of New Names in Mathematics (1938) and the age of the nephew at the time of coinage as given in Mathematics and the Imagination (9 years; subtract 9 from 1938). The 1938 article states: “I was walking in the woods with my nephew one day, and I asked the boy to think up any name for the number, any amusing name that entered his head.” It was “one day” and not necessarily in the same year. It is debatable whether it was really Milton in 1920/1921 or Edwin in 1924/1925 that Kasner was referring to. It would be clear if we knew that Kasner used the word in a lecture before 1924, but Bialik is not precise (“soon afterwards”) about that matter. -- IvanP (razgovor) 19:26, 17 juni 2017 (CEST)