Thanks to Language Log (?!), Mandana T. Manzari reports on the Large Number Championship. Two philosophers compete at MIT to produce the largest finite number ever written on an ordinary whiteboard. The winning number:
The smallest number bigger than any number that can be named by an expression in the language of first order set-theory with less than a googol (10100) symbols.
Pedants might clean up that definition to read, “an expression… with fewer than a googol symbols.”