Imagine a horizontal line. The very left is marked one thousand and the very right is marked one billion. On this line, where would you add a marker to represent one million? If you said somewhere in ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. So far this year, Quanta has chronicled three major advances in Ramsey theory, the study of how to avoid creating mathematical patterns.

This video breaks down how scientists and economists use very large numbers, with clear examples from astronomy, mathematics, and modern wealth statistics to make scale easier to understand. Gold and ...