[2] Kasner's 1899 PhD dissertation at Columbia University was titled The Invariant Theory of the Inversion Group: Geometry upon a Quadric Surface; it was published by the American Mathematical Society in 1900 in their Transactions.

On a walk in the New Jersey Palisades with his nephews, Milton (1911–1981)[3] and Edwin Sirotta, Kasner asked for their ideas.

The name "googol" was invented by a child (Dr. Kasner's nine-year-old nephew) who was asked to think up a name for a very big number, namely, 1 with a hundred zeros after it.

This is a description of what would happen if one actually tried to write a googolplex, but different people get tired at different times and it would never do to have Carnera a better mathematician than Dr. Einstein, simply because he had more endurance.

You will get some idea of the size of this very large but finite number from the fact that there would not be enough room to write it, if you went to the farthest star, touring all the nebulae and putting down zeros every inch of the way.The Internet search engine "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol",[6][7][8] and the "Googleplex" (the Google company headquarters in Mountain View, California) is similarly derived from googolplex.