Archimede's Beast Number

Archimedes was fascinated with large numbers. He famously decided to find a number to count how many grains of sand there were. The greek numbering system was a challenge though. They used letters in place of numbers. A=1, B=2, C=3, etc. Therefore, it was difficult to count very high. Before Archimedes, the largest number in the Greek number system was 10,000, which they called a myriad. While a myriad is great for counting armies, or people, it was hardly large enough to count sand! So Archimedes set to work. He was comfortable working with the area of shapes, such as the area of a square, 4 times 4 is 16. Archimedes used this idea to a far greater effect. He created a new set of numbers using this idea. Numbers of the "first order" would be a myriad times a myriad, which would be 100 million. Numbers of the "second order" would be 100 million times 100 million, which comes to a 1 followed by 16 zeroes! Now archimedes had a system to count the grains of sand. He calculated one would need a number of the "eighth order" to count the grains of sand, or a 1 followed by 64 zeros!

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (I hope I counted right) For most people this would be good enough. Archimedes, delighted with his discovery, set about to see how large of a number he could create. He used a new system, called periods, to make numbers so large we can never use them. Numbers of the "first period" could represent numbers as large as a 1 followed by 800 million zeros!! If your writing a book of zeros, this would take the same number of pages as 1000 harry potter books combined! Numbers of the "second period" would be a 1 followed by 64,000 zeros! Still not content, he continued until he reached a number larger than anything we can possibly count in the universe: his so called beast number. Archimedes called it "A Myriad Myriad units of the Myriad Myriad Order of the Myriad Myriad period.   This is a 1 followed by 80 quadrillion zeros!!! To put this in perspective, an atom is so small it can only be seen with a super super powerful microscope. How many atoms do you think are in the universe? Scientists believe the universe holds about 1 followed by 80 zeros worth of atoms. This is tiny compared to a 1 followed by 80 quadrillion zeros! There is nothing in the universe that even comes close to this number.
However, infinity is still larger!