Trust Google to hide nerdy math jokes in serious documents.
In its latest earnings document, Google announced that it was repurchasing $7,019,340,976.83 worth of its Class C stock. You’d think that the number this precise would’ve been arrived at after intense calculations by a team of crack financial analysts, who’d have spent hours hunched over spreadsheets and projections. But Google is not a conventional company.
Turns out this value is just e^26. (e raised to the power of 26). e, of course, is an important mathematical constant which is valued at 2.71828. 26 is the number of letters in the alphabet – which is also the name of Google’s parent company.
2.71828^26 = 7,019.340,97683
This isn’t the first time that Google’s played with numbers in serious situations. In its IPO, it had declared that it hoped to raise $ 2,718,281,828, which are the first 10 digits of e. It has also used math numbers in bids, once bidding for patents with the digits of the Brun’s constant and the Meissel Mertens constant. And when Googler Sanmay Ved accidently bought the Google.com domain for $12, Google bought it back from him for $6006.13, because the digits looked the “GOOGLE.”
Google is bound to have a love for numbers – its name itself a play on Googol, which is a mathematical constant equal to 10^100, or 1 followed by 100 zeros.