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52 Factorial
It Starts with a Simple Deck of Playing Cards They seem harmless enough, 52 thin slices of laminated cardboard with colorful designs printed on their sides. Yet, as another illustration of the mantra that complexity begins from the most simple systems, the number of variations that these 52 cards can produce is virtually endless.
I think the exclamation mark was chosen as the symbol for the factorial operator to highlight the fact that this function produces surprisingly large numbers in a very short time. Now do the same thing again: walk around the world at one billion years per step, removing one drop of water from the Pacific Ocean each time you circle the globe. Somewhat more of an obstacle, however, is the fact that all the stars in the universe will eventually burn out leaving space a dark, ever-expanding void inhabited by a few scattered elementary particles drifting a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero.
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