Assume there are approximately 5,000,000,000 people on earth. What would you estimate to be the result, if you multiply together the number of fingers on every person's left hands?

(If you cannot estimate the number, then try to guess how long the number would be.)

The common log of 5 is about .6989700043360187. Multiply this by 5,000,000,000 to get 3494850021.680094, the common log of the answer. It shows that the answer has 3,494,850,022 digits (one more than the characteristic of the log), and that the first few are 47873... (based on the antilog of the mantissa).

Posted by Charlie on 2003-05-06 08:06:48