alt text:
Calligraphy exam: Write down the number 37, spelled out, nicely.
explananation: https://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2966:_Exam_Numbers
My dad is a retired Math professor.
The laughter had around this started at Cosmology, then erupted at Game theory and he couldn’t breathe after the last one.
This is probably one of his most clever comics.
For the final answer, I guess Big Omega, unless you don’t count infinities in which case my answer is getting up and arguing with the professor because "the number of times I can recursively write TREE(TREE(TREE...
is just as arbitrary as declaring a biggest theoretical number and assigning it a new symbol.
Of course it includes infinities, and when was the last time you saw a postgrad exam whose answers didn’t include an argument with the professor?
The set of real numbers between 0 & 1 is larger than any countable infinity.
Man, I remember getting the kindergarten question at a point where my older brother had already told me that you can just add more digits and it always gets bigger.
I was so angry at that question, because what the hell do you want me to do here? I think, I ended up just cramming as many 9s into the box as I could, but that question is almost philosophical.
Clearly, I’m able to think of an even larger number by cramming one more 9 into there. So, what I’ve written down is always wrong. It is never the largest number that I’m actually able to think of. I’m telling you, I got forced into this life of lies and crime at a young age.
The game theory one is easy. Put down 999,999,999,999 factorial. Then everyone got it wrong, and the curve will reflect that.
Only if it’s “10 more” in the sense that anything bigger than that is also accepted. If you need to hit 57, because the average is 47, then yeah, good luck.
That’s why it’s always between 1 and 100. Never seen one without an upper and lower bound.
2 is pretty big. Oh, or π! That’s probably the biggest number I’ve seen this month.