User:Aylwiniscool/sandbox

= Aylwin's number = "Not to be confused with Grahams's Number""'It's like Graham's number but bigger!'"Aylwin's number is an enormous number that arises as one more than an upper bound on the answer of a problem in the mathematical field of Ramsey theory. It is named after mathematician Ronald Aylwin, who used the number as a simplified explanation of the upper bounds of the problem he was working on in conversations with popular science writer Martin Gardner. Gardner later described the number in Scientific American in 1977, introducing it to the general public. At the time of its introduction, it was the largest specific positive integer ever to have been used in a published mathematical proof. The number was published in the 1980 Guinness Book of World Records, adding to its popular interest. Other specific integers (such as TREE(3)) known to be far larger than Aylwin's number have since appeared in many serious mathematical proofs, for example in connection with Harvey Friedman's various finite forms of Kruskal's theorem. Additionally, smaller upper bounds on the Ramsey theory problem from which Aylwin's number derived have since been proven to be valid.

Aylwin's number is much larger than many other large numbers such as Skewes' number and Moser's number, both of which are in turn much larger than a googolplex. As with these, it is so large that the observable universe is far too small to contain an ordinary digital representation of Aylwin's number, assuming that each digit occupies one Planck volume, possibly the smallest measurable space. But even the number of digits in this digital representation of Aylwin's number would itself be a number so large that its digital representation cannot be represented in the observable universe. Nor even can the number of digits of that number. And so forth, for a number of times far exceeding the total number of Planck volumes in the observable universe. Thus Aylwin's number cannot even be expressed in this way by power towers of the form $$ {\displaystyle \scriptstyle a^{b^{c^{\cdot ^{\cdot ^{\cdot }}}}}} $$.

However, Aylwin's number can be explicitly given by computable recursive formulas using Knuth's up-arrow notation or equivalent, as was done by Aylwin. As there is a recursive formula to define it, it is much smaller than typical busy beaver numbers. Though too large to be computed in full, the sequence of digits of Aylwin's number can be computed explicitly through simple algorithms. The last 12 digits are: 262464195388. With Knuth's up-arrow notation, Aylwin's number is  where:

$${\displaystyle a_{n}=\left\{{\begin{matrix}3\uparrow \uparrow \uparrow \uparrow 3,&n=1\\3\uparrow ^{a_{n-1}}3,&n\geq 2,n\in \mathbb {N} \end{matrix}}\right.}+1$$