50,000!

Just for Matt Lavine:

fifty-thousand-bang.txt

(It turns out that MovableType can’t handle a post with the number in it. So, I had to put the number in a separate file.)

The program that generated this was actually quite short; it was written in Scheme, and if you download DrScheme, you can use it to generate your own very large numbers. 50,000! is, for the curious, 213,237 digits long.

(define (fact n)
  (if (zero? n)
    1
    (* n (fact (sub1 n)))))

(fact 50000)

Interestingly, the program that formatted the number into 10×10 blocks was a good bit more complex.

Update 20051121: Matt pointed out that I actually dropped digits when formatting the 10×10 blocks. I’ll have to post an updated version of 50,000! shortly.