The number of grains of sand on a beach has often been the analogy of choice when trying to describe a number that is too large for comprehension. Most famously, Carl Sagan said that there are more stars in our Universe than there are grains of sand in all the beaches on Earth.
However, Sagan was by no means the first to refer to sand to explain the enormity of the universe. The Ancient Greek polymath Archimedes, philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and so on, fed-up of people resorting to infinity as a cop-out to dealing with large, but otherwise finite numbers, invented a new counting system. In an essay addressed to the King Gelon of Syracuse, titled The Sand Reckoner, he proposed a system to deal with the problem. He invented a numeric system based on powers of 10 which was capable of describing unimaginably large numbers, including the number of grains of sand that could be fit in the entire universe – (He estimated this to be 8×1063). This, remember, was at a time when Europe was using number systems such as the Roman number system that were wholly ill-suited for efficient maths.
This is the only dip into ancient Greek mathematics to be found in this blog. The rest of the site originally started as a review of all things to do with the Internet of Things. It has since digressed into technical, leadership, product and strategy topics relating to creating connected products and technology best practice, be it AI, machine learning, cloud platforms, agile, lean, devops, digital transformation, or whatever the latest fad may be. Over the past five years since I have been writing this, topics have ranged from the defeat of the Romans at Carrhae to the adoption of DevOps to deploy Machine Learning pipelines.
The original premise, however, remains. All of the above deal with large-scale connectivity and enormous amounts of data and large numbers of users, devices, and applications. The permutations and number of relationships involved between people, objects, sensors, applications and services involve complexity and scale on an almost incomprehensible scale. Through his truly revolutionary leap of the imagination, Archimedes gave us the first tools to deal with such complexity. He really is the father of large-scale computing and all the complex applications that it enables.
For the full text see here.
Simon Fabri
Too many big words🤯