Orders of magnitude (numbers)
This list compares various sizes of finite
numbers, including counts of things, dimensionless numbers and
probabilities. See also the order of magnitude lists on
length,
area,
volume,
mass and
time and the overview article
orders of magnitude, which has pointers to other similar lists.
- 10-24
- 10-21
- 10-18
- 10-15
- 10-12
- 10-9
- Lottery: The odds of winning the Grand Prize (matching all 6 numbers) in the US Powerball Multistate Lottery, with a single ticket, under the current rules, are 120,526,770 to 1 against, for a probability of 8 × 10-9.
- Lottery: The odds of winning the Jackpot (matching the 6 main numbers) in the UK National Lottery, with a single ticket, under the current rules, are 13,983,816 to 1 against, for a probability of 7 × 10-8.
- 10-6
- Poker: The odds of being dealt a royal flush in poker are 649,739 to 1 against, for a probability of 1.5 × 10-6
- Poker: The odds of being dealt a straight flush (other than a royal flush) in poker are 72,192 to 1 against, for a probability of 1.4 × 10-5
- Poker: The odds of being dealt a four of a kind in poker are 4,164 to 1 against, for a probability of 2.4 × 10-4
- Poker: The odds of being dealt a full house in poker are 693 to 1 against, for a probability of 1.4 × 10-3
- 10-3
- Poker: The odds of being dealt a flush in poker are 508 to 1 against, for a probability of 1.9 × 10-3
- Poker: The odds of being dealt a straight in poker are 254 to 1 against, for a probability of 4 × 10-3
- α = 0.007 297 352 533(27), the fine structure constant
- 10-2
- HIV: About 1.2% of all 15-49 year-old humans were infected with HIV at the end of 2001
- Lottery: The odds of winning any prize in the UK National Lottery, with a single ticket, under the current rules, are 54 to 1 against, for a probability of about 1.8%
- Poker: The odds of being dealt a three of a kind in poker are 46 to 1 against, for a probability of 2.1%
- Lottery: The odds of winning any prize in the US Powerball Multistate Lottery, with a single ticket, under the current rules, are 36.06 to 1 against, for a probability of 2.8%
- Poker: The odds of being dealt two pair in poker are 20 to 1 against, for a probability of 4.8%.
- 10-1
- Poker: The odds of being dealt only one pair in poker are about 4 to 3 against (1.37 to 1), for a probability of 0.42 (42%).
- Poker: The odds of being dealt no pair in poker are nearly 1 to 1, for a probability of about 0.5 (50%).
- one
- 10
- there are 10 fingers on a pair of human hands
- In Olympic basketball, the roster limit for a team is 12 (and they are limited to wearing numbers 4 through 15).
- there are 26 letters in the Latin alphabet
- In NCAA basketball, players are not to wear digits above 5, and they are limited to one or two digits, making 42 distinct combinations (although 01, 02, 03, 04, and 05 typically aren't used). Since the roster limit is typically around 12, this doesn't present that much of a problem.
- 102
- In North American professional sports, players typically wear uniform numbers from 1 to 99. In some sports, 0 and 00 are also allowed, making 101 different combinations.
- there are 128 characters is the ASCII character set
- there were 191 member states of the United Nations as of 2003
- 103
- 2000-3000 letters on a typical typed page of text
- the DNA of the simplest viruses has some 5000 base pairs.
- 104
- Each neuron in the human brain is estimated to connect to 10,000 others
- There are 20,000 - 40,000 distinct Chinese characters, depending on how you count them
- Each human being is estimated to have 30,000 to 40,000 genes
- 105
- Hairs on a head: The average human head has about 100,000-150,000 hairs
- English words: The New Oxford Dictionary of English claims to contain 350,000 definitions for English words
- 564,000 words in War and Peace
- The freedb database holds information for around 700,000 different compact discs
- 106 -- 1 million
- Geographic places: The NIMA GEOnet Names Server contains approximately 3.88 million named geographical features outside the United States, with 5.34 million names. The USGS Geographic Names Information System claims to have almost 2 million physical and cultural geographic features within the United States.
- Species: The World Resources Institute claims that approximately 1.4 million species have been named, out of an unknown number of total species (estimates range between 2 and 100 million species).
- Playing cards: There are 2,598,960 different 5-card poker hands that can be dealt from a standard 52-card deck.
- Web sites: as of July 2003, the Netcraft web survey estimates that there are 42 million distinct web sites
- Books: The British Library claims that it holds over 150 million items. The Library of Congress claims that it holds approximately 119 million items. See Gutenberg galaxy
- Compact Disc: Depending on type and other factors, a compact disk contains about 600-750 million bytes of information. A modern computer CD drive can read or write this information in a few minutes.
- 109 -- 1 billion
- Cataloged stars: The Guide Star Catalog II has entries on 998,402,801 distinct astronomical objects
- Computational limit of a 32-bit CPU: 2,147,483,647 is equal to 231-1, and as such is the largest number which can fit into a signed (two's complement) 32-bit integer on a computer, thus marking the upper computational limit of a 32-bit CPU such as Intel's Pentium-class computer chips.
- Base pairs in the genome: approximately 3×109 base pairs in the human genome
- Web pages: approximately 3 × 109 web pages indexed by Google in 2003
- Living human beings: approximately 6.3×109 human beingss living as of mid 2003
- Observable galaxies: between 1×1010 and 8×1010 galaxies in the observable (as of 2003) Universe
- Neurons in the brain: approximately 1011 neurons in the human brain
- Stars in our Galaxy: approximately 4 × 1011 stars in the Milky Way galaxy
- 1012 -- 1 trillion
- Bits on a disk: As of 2003, an inexpensive (200 Gbyte) hard disk drive stored 1.6 × 1012 bits
- Known digits of pi: As of 2003, the number of known digits of pi was 1,241,100,000,000
- Cells in the human body: the human body consists of roughly 1013 cellss
- Bacteria in the human body: there are roughly 1014 bacteria in the human body
- 1015 -- 1 quadrillion
- Grains of sand: it has been estimated that all the world's beaches put together hold roughly 2 × 1015 grains of sand
- 1018
- Insects: It has been estimated that the insect population of the Earth comprises roughly 1018 insects.
- Rubik's Cube: There are 4.3 × 1019 different positions of a Rubik's Cube
- 1021
- 1024
- 1027
- Atoms in the human body: the average human body contains roughly 7×1027 atoms, see [1]
- Larger
- The Eddington-Dirac number is roughly 1040.
- About 1047 molecules of water on Earth
- Earth consists of roughly 1050 atoms
- Fundamental particles in the observable universe: various sources estimate the total number of fundamental particles in the observable universe in the range 1080 to 1085. However, these estimates are best regarded as guesswork.
- 10100, a googol
- 106,320,430, order of magnitude of largest known prime number, as of Q1 2004. The exact value of that record prime is 220996011 - 1. Proving prime numbers with a thousand to several tens of thousands of decimal digits, depending on special form, can be done in minutes on modern computers.
- 1080,000,000,000,000,000, largest named number in Archimedes' Sand Reckoner
- 10googol (), a googolplex
- , order of magnitude of an upper bound that occurred in a proof of Skewes
- , order of magnitude of another upper bound in a proof of Skewes
- ...
See also
External links