How many tweets are possible? Here we calculate an exact value for the number of tweets of up to 140 characters in length generated from the standard computer keyboard.
We formulate a mathematical description of tweets as functions mapping the numbers {1,2,...,140} to the 95 characters on the standard computer keyboard. We use the Map Counting Theorem from function theory to calculate the tweet number.
The tweet number is much larger than google...squared!
Math trivia fans know the original name for 10^100 was googol, not google, and a googolplex is 10^googol.
There are at least three other intuitive ways to calculate the tweet number. Can you find one?
Annotations updated April 4, 2014
Show less