Abstract
“God,” said Leopold Kronecker [10], “made the integers; everything else is the work of man.” If Kronecker was right, it would be heresy to claim that any noninteger numbers are supernatural in the sense that they have miraculous powers. On the other hand, mathematicians generally refer to the nonnegative integers {,1,2,...} as the set of natural numbers; therefore if any numbers are supernatural, they are also natural. The purpose of this essay is to discuss the representation of natural numbers that are “super” in the sense that they are extremely large; many superscripts are needed to express them in conventional notation.
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© 1981 Wadsworth International
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Knuth, D.E. (1981). Supernatural Numbers. In: Klarner, D.A. (eds) The Mathematical Gardner. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-6686-7_28
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-6686-7_28
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