Now that Google's IPO is running, the company is on the verge of being sued by the family of a man who invented the word 'Googol' to describe a very big number. Professor Edward Kasner came up with the word Googol, apparently at the suggestion of his 9-year-old nephew, Milton Sirotta. He used the term in the 1940s in his book, Mathematics and the Imagination. For the record a googol is 10 raised to the 100th power - or the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros.
In 1955 he died and much later a search engine called Google was born. His relatives claim that Kasner must be spinning in his grave. They believe Google has gained financially at their expense and they want to become IPO insiders to put his soul to rest. Hacks from the Baltimore Sun interviewed Kasner's great-niece Peri Fleisher who is coincidently a compensation specialist for a Silicon Valley firm. She admitted that she was only four when Kasner died, and could only just remember him.
News source: The Inquirer
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