Roughly the chances of getting heads 40 times in a row on a fair coin.
10-9 or 0.000 000 001
Lottery: The odds of winning the Grand Prize (matching all 6 numbers) in the US Powerball Multistate Lottery, with a single ticket, under the rules as at 2003, are 120,526,770 to 1 against, for a probability of 8 × 10-9.
Lottery: The odds of winning the Jackpot (matching the 6 main numbers) in the UK National Lottery, with a single ticket, under the rules as at 2003, are 13,983,816 to 1 against, for a probability of 7 × 10-8.
HIV: About 1.2% of all 15-49 year-old humans were infected with HIVat the end of 2001
Lottery: The odds of winning any prize in the UK National Lottery, with a single ticket, under the rules as at 2003, are 54 to 1 against, for a probability of about 0.018 (1.8%)
Poker: The odds of being dealt a three of a kind in poker are 46 to 1 against, for a probability of 0.021 (2.1%)
Lottery: The odds of winning any prize in the US Powerball Multistate Lottery, with a single ticket, under the rules as at 2003, are 36.06 to 1 against, for a probability of 0.028 (2.8%)
Poker: The odds of being dealt two pair in poker are 20 to 1 against, for a probability of 0.048 (4.8%).
In NCAA basketball, players are not to wear digits above 5, and they are limited to one or two digits, making 42 distinct combinations (although 01, 02, 03, 04, and 05 typically aren't used). Since the roster limit is typically around 12, this doesn't present that much of a problem.
In North American professional sports, players typically wear uniform numbers from 1 to 99. In some sports, 0 and 00 are also allowed, making 101 different combinations.
There are 100 Senators in the United States Senate.
There are 128 characters in the ASCII character set.
There were 191 member states of the United Nations as of 2003.
Geographic places: The NIMA GEOnet Names Server contains approximately 3.88 million named geographical features outside the United States, with 5.34 million names. The USGS Geographic Names Information System claims to have almost 2 million physical and cultural geographic features within the United States.
Species: The World Resources Institute claims that approximately 1.4 million species have been named, out of an unknown number of total species (estimates range between 2 and 100 million species).
Chess: There are 2 279 184 solutions to n-Queens Problem for n = 15
Playing cards: There are 2 598 960 different 5-card poker hands that can be dealt from a standard 52-card deck.
Web sites: as of July 2003, the Netcraft web survey estimates that there are 42 million distinct web sites
109 or 1 000 000 000 or 1 billion (short scale), 1 milliard (long scale)
Cataloged stars: The Guide Star Catalog II has entries on 998,402,801 distinct astronomical objects
Computational limit of a 32-bit CPU: 2 147 483 647 is equal to 231-1, and as such is the largest number which can fit into a signed (two's complement) 32-bit integer on a computer, thus marking the upper computational limit of a 32-bit CPU such as Intel's Pentium-class computer chips.
Base pairs in the genome: approximately 3×109base pairs in the human genome
World population - 6,378,000,000 - Estimated total midyear population for the world in 2004.
4,294,967,296 - smallest number of the form (2^(2^n)) that does not produce a prime number when 1 is added.
4,294,967,296 - the amount of bytes in 4 gigabyte; in computation, the 32-bit computers can directly access 232 pieces of address space, this leads directly to the 4 Gigabyte limit on main memory.
4,294,967,296 - total number of CMYK colors possible when using 8 bit integers for each color component. However, virtually unlimited colors are possible by using floats from 0 to 1 as color components, so this limit is less important than it might seem.
2,147,483,647 is a Mersenne prime and a Zsigmondy number
Grains of sand: all the world's beaches put together hold roughly 2 × 1015 grains of sand
1018 or 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 or 1 quintillion (short scale), 1 trillion (long scale)
Insects: It has been estimated that the insect population of the Earth comprises roughly 1018 insects.
Rubik's Cube: There are 4.3 × 1019 different positions of a Rubik's Cube
1021 or 1 sextillion (short scale), 1 trilliard (long scale)
Stars: 70 sextillion, was recently given by Australianastronomers as the number of stars visible from Earth by Telescope. It could also be called 70 million trillion or 70 billion billion.
Stars in the observable universe: there are very approximately estimated to be 7 × 1022stars in the observable universe, based on galaxy counts and star estimates: [1]
Fundamental particles in the observable universe: various sources estimate the total number of fundamental particles in the observable universe in the range 1080 to 1085. However, these estimates are best regarded as guesswork.
107,816,229, order of magnitude of largest known prime number, as of February 2005. The exact value of that record prime is 225,964,951 - 1. Proving prime numbers with a thousand to several tens of thousands of decimal digits, depending on special form, can be done in minutes on modern computers.
, order of magnitude of an upper bound that occurred in a proof of Skewes
, order of magnitude of another upper bound in a proof of Skewes
Graham's number, probably the largest number seriously used in a mathematical proof, can be written as f64(4); representation in powers of 10 would be impractical, for the definition of the number see the main article about it
...
Note: To correctly interpret the last few entries, keep in mind that exponentiation is performed from right to left. For example,
), a 
, order of magnitude of an upper bound that occurred in a 
, order of magnitude of another upper bound in a proof of Skewes
