The Final Countdown by David Devlin

Have you ever wondered how many ways a single deck of 52 playing cards can be arranged? This treatise will discuss that number. It is a big number. A huge number. An almost unpronounceable number. Actually, there are no words in the English language or (arguably) any other language to express just how extraordinarily, frightfully, and tremendous this number is. This is a number so enormous and so long that we as human beings actually cannot comprehend its true nature. The number is known as, “52-Factorial”.

What David Devlin has done here is made reasonable, yet still difficult to truly imagine, comparisons of things that we can at least visualize to this number. These are things such as grains of sand, time, speed, distances, and single sheets of paper. While even the numbers involved with these things are so enormous that we cannot mentally interpret them, they pale in comparison to the number of ways in which a single deck of 52 cards can be arranged.

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