It can be difficult to grasp massively large numbers. Human brains are wired to interpret smaller numbers, and struggle to accurately assess numbers that get really big. Both in school and in everyday life, young people often hear about big numbers but may not fully understand their size and scale.
How to Visualize Large Numbers: Methods and Tools
Illustrations and visualizations put big numbers into terms our brains can understand. Sometimes a well-designed visualization can add meaning and make the massive more relatable. In this blog, we’ll be sharing examples of visual representations to help learners of all ages wrap their minds around particularly giant numbers.
Books to Illustrate Large Numbers
A well-illustrated story can be an excellent way to approach big quantities. Everybody Counts by Kristin Roskifte is a children’s book that illustrates different-sized groups of people. This uniquely drawn book shows a community starting with one individual and growing to a whole planet full of 7.5 billion people. Each page features a specific number of individuals: 1, 2, 3… 10… 15… 200… all the way up to 1,000. Readers can see the crowds getting larger and larger, and can compare the size of groups between one page and the next.
Young learners have a particularly difficult time grasping giant numbers. This book tells subtle stories about individuals to keep the numbers from getting too overwhelming. Characters reoccur on each page, and each time they show up, we see a new snapshot of their lives. Students play seek and find to locate specific people or items. Readers can tell if the boy that lost his stuffie gets reunited in the end, or where the married couple meets for the first time. The emphasis on these individual stories makes the numbers intimate, relatable, and fun. A helpful list of questions and hints at the back of the book helps adults and children uncover new details and hidden stories told throughout the pages.
Check out additional children’s books for visualizing large numbers.
Videos to Illustrate Large Numbers
The classic Powers of Ten video, published in 1977, is still a relevant and compelling tool for visualizing huge numbers. It takes viewers on a visual exploration of distance and scale, starting with a picnic blanket in Chicago that is one meter by one meter square. The camera pans out by powers of 10, and the picnic blanket gets smaller and smaller. Eventually the viewer pans so far out that all of Earth is visible, then the Milky Way, then the entire galaxy. By the end, even our galaxy is so tiny as to be invisible. The camera reverses course, zooms back into Chicago, and dives deep into a cell in the picnicker’s hand. Over 9 minutes, the video illustrates distances from 10-16 meters to 1024 meters: from deep within an atom to the broad swath of the universe.
Population data is also a great source for visualizing big numbers. There are over 8 billion people (and growing) on our planet. A number that big can be difficult to grasp. PopEd’s World Population video illustrates how we arrived at our current population by mapping population changes from 1 C.E. to 2050 C.E. Each dot represents one million people. The video starts with 170 dots and increases nearly-exponentially until much of the globe is a solid mass of yellow dots. The beating heart adds a sensory layer to the visual of population increasing to create a visceral sense of scale.
Art to Illustrate Large Numbers
If visualizing large numbers is the goal, turning to art is the obvious solution. Creativity in painting, drawing, print, sculpture, and media bring numbers to life in interesting and evocative ways. For example, the Bristol Whale sculpture repurposes 70,000 plastic water bottles discarded after running races in the UK. The scale of the sculpture brings home the impact that single-use plastics can have on ocean life. Similarly, Tara Donovan’s work highlights everyday mass-produced objects that have impacts on the environment in large-scale sculptural pieces.
Ai Weiwei’s installations provide commentary on a range of issues from refugee crises to globalization to political dissent. Several of his well-known pieces contain large numbers of repeating forms. The scale makes the art immersive and overwhelming, bringing the viewer into the center of really large numbers, and connecting the numbers to real life issues. Explore Sunflower Seeds (one million seeds) and Forever Bicycles in Winnipeg (over 1,200 bikes) for a peek into his work.
For younger learners, combining math and art is a natural way to explore scale in numbers. For example, this classroom art project uses base ten blocks to make Piet Mondrian-style paintings. Students compare ones, tens, and hundreds blocks, fitting them together in geometric designs that highlight the difference in scale. It reinforces place values, compares the size of numbers, and plays with color and composition.
Making Big Numbers More Relatable
Whether using books, videos, or art to explore big numbers in the classroom, visual representations help make big numbers less abstract and more relatable. Drawings, films, or sculptures showing hundreds, thousands, millions, and billions brings the scale to life. This type of visualization helps students really grasp the size and scope of the numbers and connect them to real-life content.
Image credits: Whale sculpture (Bristol Whales by Alan Parkinson is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0); Forever Bicycles (Lorie Shaull from St Paul, United States, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
