How many grains of sand would it take to fill the Universe? This was the problem that Archimedes tackled over 2,000 years ago. In his work The Sand Reckoner, he dared to calculate numbers so vast that ordinary Greek numerals simply collapsed. The challenge was how to get there working with the biggest number he know at the time, the myriad, meaning ten thousand.
The Greeks already used myriad as a building block for big numbers, 100 myriads made a million, and the scale could be stretched further. But Archimedes pushed this humble unit into new territory. He imagined stacking myriads upon myriads, inventing a way to climb numerically far beyond what daily language allowed. By grouping digits into powers of a myriad, he built a system resembling exponential notation, that is common in modern mathematics.
Archimedes started by estimating how many tiny poppy seeds would fit into a grain of sand, then scaled up to imagine how many grains of sand would fill a human hand, a stadium, and eventually the entire Earth. From there, he extended the logic outward, calculating how many Earths might fit inside the celestial sphere of his time, with the stars at its outer edge. Using the myriad system to keep multiplying in leaps of ten-thousand, he arrived at a mind-boggling figure: about 10e63 grains of sand to fill the cosmos.
Today, we may use scientific notation instead of myriads, but Archimedes’ stunt still matters. It showed that numbers aren’t only tools of commerce, they’re instruments of imagination. By chaining together myriads, he turned infinity into something humans could reason about. The Sand Reckoner reminds us that mathematics isn’t just about answers, but about creating the language to ask bigger questions.
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