The number of grains of sand on a beach is a frequently used shorthand for a number that is too large for comprehension. 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. Over 2,200 years ago, the ancient Greek polymath Archimedes, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer, 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 called “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 similar to 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 tech products. This encompasses machine learning, cloud platforms, agile, lean, devops and so on. Over the past few years, unsurprisingly, I have dedicated much attention to trying to make sense of the AI revolution. 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 common thread throughout this blog remains how to make sense of and harness technological change. It goes without saying that all thoughts here are my own, and certainly not those of my employer(s). I do make use of LLMs to facilitate the research, but the ideas and writing are my own.
For the full text see here.
Simon Fabri
Too many big words🤯