[seqfan] Re: Large English integer names: Mathematica vs. num2words

[Arthur O'Dwyer]

FYI, I just submitted a pull request against Python `num2words` that
adjusts all of the number names as requested in
https://github.com/savoirfairelinux/num2words/issues/514
https://github.com/savoirfairelinux/num2words/pull/517
Maybe someone with Mathematica would volunteer to double-check that all the
names up to 10^300 *now* match Mathematica's names.

For the record, I 100% agree with Allan Wechsler that there is no "truth"
to be found here; this is a political/cultural issue, not a question of
"finding out" the true names of these numbers (because numbers do not,
*really*, have names: we just invent names for them as needed based on our
various cultures).  Which is why all these OEIS sequences involving "number
of letters in the name of..." are non-mathematical and have a relatively
short shelf life (measured in decades, at best). Besides the
million/milliard issue, there's even more basic disagreements among
cultures on what the most appropriate names are ("one hundred million"
versus "ten crore"), or even how to count the letters ("one hundred" versus
"一百").

Cheers,
Arthur

On Sun, Apr 30, 2023, 8:24 PM M. F. Hasler <oeis at hasler.fr> wrote:

> 1) num2words has several bugs. I tried to provide fixes when I discovered
> the one mentioned in oeis.org/A006969, but their "testing" suite would
> reject them because the tests require the wrong result. I tried hard and
> eventually gave up. (Then I submitted some of the bug reports in the
> "issues" list, so maybe someone more competent fixed some of them...)
>
> 2) Peter, we can't expect to find "million, billion, trillion," and so
> forth wherever it is used, at least not in the program section:
> A systematic programmer would construct these names from the prefix (m, b,
> tr, quadr, quint, sext, ...) and the other parts (-illi- and  -on/ -ard and
> possibly -s or -en in German)
> — especially when the list goes beyond the first few terms. (Cf. e.g.
> oeis.org/A007208)
>
> -M.
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 26, 2023, 13:24 Peter Munn <techsubs at pearceneptune.co.uk>
> wrote:
>
> > On Tue, April 25, 2023 12:13 am, Allan Wechsler wrote:
> > > The point is that *none* of these words is "correct". They are so rare
> > > that
> > > there has been almost no social pressure to form a consensus. The "Book
> > of
> > > Numbers" table was an attempt to form a consensus, but its
> > recommendations
> > > still have lots of competition and at the moment there is no principled
> > > way to select from the available options.
> >
> > Isn't the truth that the consensus is extremely  strongly against
> thinking
> > about larger exponents in a skewed version of a mix of ternary and
> > decimal? Who would think "instead of saying to my new colleague 'ten to
> > the power sixty-five' I could say 'one hundred vigintillion' ", except
> > deliberately to perplex?
> >
> > A widely used system of words for very big numbers will only happen, I
> > conjecture, based on purely decimal exponents. Note the results of OEIS
> > searches below.
> >
> > Best regards,
> >
> > Peter
> >
> > Search: trillion -keyword:word
> > Displaying 1-10 of 66 results found.
> >
> > Search: quadrillion -keyword:word
> > Displaying 1-1 of 1 result found.
> >
> > (quintillion would also get only one hit, A137411, were it not for its
> > presence in the title of a Kourbatov paper)
> >
> > Search: decillion -keyword:word
> > Search: vigintillion -keyword:word
> > Search: centillion -keyword:word
> >  all yield:
> > Sorry, but the terms do not match anything in the table.
> >
> > *but* ...
> >
> > Search: googol -keyword:word -"little googol"
> > Displaying 1-10 of 28 results found.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
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> >
>
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