In German Jesuit Christopher Clavius’s en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Clavius ‘In Sphaerum Ionnis de Sacro Bosco’, the author considers how many ‘dictiones’, or how many terms, could be produced with the twenty three letters of the latin alphabet (at the time there was no difference between ‘u’ and ‘v’ and no ‘k’ or ‘y’) combining them two by two, there by three, and so on, up to the words made up of twenty three letters. Clavius supplies the mathematical formulas for this calculus, but he stops shot at a certain point before the immensity of the Possible results, especially if repetitions were tobe included.
In 1622, Pierre Guldin composed his ‘Problema arithematicum de rerun combinationibus’ in which he calculates all the dictionary that can be generated with twenty-three letters, regardless of whether they make sense or can be pronounced, but not including repeittions., he establishes that the number of words (of variable length fromm two to twenty-three letters) would be more than 70,000 billion billion (to write them out would require more than a million billion billion letters)
To have an idea of the implications of this number, think of writing all of the words in registers of 1,000 pages, with 100 lines per page and sixty characters per line. They would fill 257 million billion such registers. And if we wished to house them in a library – Guldin studies point by point its arrangement, its extension, how one would navigate within it we had at our disposal cubic structures measuring 432 feet per side, each of them capable of holding 32 million volumes, 8,052,122,350 each bookcases would be required. But what realm could acommmodate so many structures? Calculating the surface available throughout the entire planet, we could accommodate only 7,575,213,799 of them! ~ Page 421
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Dinesh said:
In 1622, Pierre Guldin composed his ‘Problema arithematicum de rerun combinationibus’ in which he calculates all the dictionary that can be generated with twenty-three letters, regardless of whether they make sense or can be pronounced, but not including repeittions., he establishes that the number of words (of variable length fromm two to twenty-three letters) would be more than 70,000 billion billion (to write them out would require more than a million billion billion letters)
To have an idea of the implications of this number, think of writing all of the words in registers of 1,000 pages, with 100 lines per page and sixty characters per line. They would fill 257 million billion such registers. And if we wished to house them in a library – Guldin studies point by point its arrangement, its extension, how one would navigate within it we had at our disposal cubic structures measuring 432 feet per side, each of them capable of holding 32 million volumes, 8,052,122,350 each bookcases would be required. But what realm could acommmodate so many structures? Calculating the surface available throughout the entire planet, we could accommodate only 7,575,213,799 of them! ~ Page 421