On Monday, a correspondent called from National Public Radio to discuss the implications of typesetting a number with twelve million digits.
Monday's call came from Joe Palca, a science correspondent for NPR's Morning Edition, who was meditating on the best way to convey the magnitude of this number. Scientific notation is designed to reduce astronomically large numbers down to more manageable ones, which obscures the enormity of numbers like 243112609-1. What does it mean for a number to contain 12,978,189 digits? For comparison, the total number of atoms in the universe is often estimated at 1080, a mere bagatelle of just 81 digits.
Joe liked the idea of measuring how long this number would be if it were set in type, which immediately called into question the choice of font. The number's length would depend chiefly on the width of the font selected, and even listener-friendly choices like Times Roman and Helvetica would produce dramatically different outcomes. Small eccentricities in the design of a particular number, such as Times Roman's inexplicably scrawny figure one, would have huge consequences when multiplied out to this length. But even this isn't the hairy part. Where things get difficult, as always, is in the kerning.
