ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Steinhaus–Moser notation

The Steinhaus-Moser Notation is a way of writing very big numbers using only a few symbols. It's like a secret code that people who really like math use to talk about really, really big numbers.

Imagine you have ten candies, and you want to give them all to your friends. You could count each candy out one by one: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. That's one way to do it, but it takes a long time if you have a lot of candies.

The Steinhaus-Moser Notation makes it much easier to talk about big numbers. Instead of counting out each candy, you could just say "ten candies". That's like using the Steinhaus-Moser Notation to talk about a number.

But what if you have more than ten candies? You could say "ten candies, then one more", or "ten candies times two", or even "ten candies squared". These are all different ways of talking about the same amount of candy.

The Steinhaus-Moser Notation uses symbols like "↑" and "↓" and "Ψ" to talk about really big numbers in a similar way. For example, "3↑↑3" means three to the power of three to the power of three (which is a really, really big number).

So, to sum up: the Steinhaus-Moser Notation is like a way of talking about really big numbers without having to count them all out one by one. It uses special symbols to make it easier to talk about these huge numbers.