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Mathematics portal

1,000,000,000 (one billion, short scale; one thousand million or milliard, long scale) is the natural number following 999,999,999 and preceding 1,000,000,001.

In scientific notation, it is written as 10⁹.

A billion traditionally equated to one million, million, (1,000,000,000,000) though the short scale (American English) billion of merely one thousand million (1,000,000,000) has been adopted in finance and increasingly in other fields. The unambiguous term thousand million has the same meaning in both scales.

In South Asian English, it is known as 100 crore or 1 arab.

The term milliard can also be used to refer to 1,000,000,000; this name very often appears in other languages.

This terminology is rarely used in English outside of British English. The SI prefix giga indicates 1,000,000,000 times the base unit.

See Orders of magnitude (numbers) for larger numbers; and long and short scales.

Selected 10-digit numbers (1,000,000,000–9,999,999,999)[link]

Visualisation of powers of ten from one to 1 billion

• 1023456789 – smallest pandigital number in base 10
• 1026753849 – smallest pandigital square that includes 0
• 1073676287 – 15th Carol number
• 1073741824 = 2³⁰
• 1073807359 – 14th Kynea number
• 1129760415 – 23rd Motzkin number
• 1134903170 – 45th Fibonacci number
• 1162261467 = 3¹⁹
• 1220703125 = 5¹³
• 1234567890 – pandigital number with the digits in order
• 1311738121 – 25th Pell number
• 1382958545 – 15th Bell number
• 1406818759 – 30th Wedderburn–Etherington number
• 1836311903 – 46th Fibonacci number
• 1882341361 – The least prime whose reversal is both square (40391²) and triangular (triangular of 57121).
• 1977326743 = 7¹¹
• 2147483647 – 8th Mersenne prime and the largest signed 32-bit integer
• 2147483648 = 2³¹
• 2214502422 – 6th primary pseudoperfect number
• 2357947691 = 11⁹
• 2971215073 – 11th Fibonacci prime (47th Fibonacci number)
• 3166815962 – 26th Pell number
• 3192727797 – 24th Motzkin number
• 3323236238 – 31st Wedderburn–Etherington number
• 3405691582 – hexadecimal CAFEBABE; used as a placeholder in programming.
• 3405697037 – hexadecimal CAFED00D; used as a placeholder in programming.
• 3486784401 = 3²⁰
• 4294836223 – 16th Carol number
• 4294967291 – Largest prime 32-bit unsigned integer
• 4294967295 – Maximum 32-bit unsigned integer (hexadecimal FFFFFFFF)
• 4294967296 = 2³²
• 4294967297 – the first composite Fermat number
• 4295098367 – 15th Kynea number
• 4807526976 – 48th Fibonacci number
• 5784634181 – 13th alternating factorial
• 6103515625 = 5¹⁴
• 6210001000 – only self-descriptive number in base 10
• 6227020800 = 13!
• 6983776800 – 15th colossally abundant number
• 7645370045 – 27th Pell number
• 7778742049 – 49th Fibonacci number
• 7862958391 – 32nd Wedderburn–Etherington number
• 8589869056 – 6th perfect number
• 8589934592 = 2³³
• 9043402501 – 25th Motzkin number
• 9814072356 – largest square pandigital number, largest pandigital pure power
• 9876543210 – largest pandigital number without redundant digits

Sense of scale[link]

The facts below give a sense of how large 1,000,000,000 (10⁹) is in the context of time according to current scientific evidence:

• 10⁹ seconds is 114 days short of 32 calendar years (≈ 31.7 years).
• About 10⁹ minutes ago, the Roman Empire was flourishing and Christianity was emerging. (10⁹ minutes is roughly 1,900 years.) A billion minutes ago, Trajan was emperor in Rome^[1].
• About 10⁹ hours ago, modern human beings and their ancestors were living in the Stone Age (more precisely, the Middle Paleolithic). (10⁹ hours is roughly 114,000 years.)
• About 10⁹ days ago, Australopithecus, an ape-like creature related to an ancestor of modern humans, roamed the African savannas. (10⁹ days is roughly 2.7 million years.)
• About 10⁹ months ago, dinosaurs walked the Earth during the late Cretaceous. (10⁹ months is roughly 82 million years.)
• About 10⁹ years ago, the first multicellular eukaryotes appeared on Earth.
• The universe is currently thought to be about 13.7 × 10⁹ years old.

In terms of distance:

• 10⁹ inches is 15,783 miles (25,400 km), more than halfway around the world and sufficient to reach any point on the globe from any other point.
• 10⁹ metres is almost three times the distance from the Earth to the Moon.
• 10⁹ kilometres is over six times the distance from the Earth to the Sun.

In terms of finance:

• The possession of assets with total value of 10⁹ United States dollars would place a person among the world's wealthiest individuals.
• As visualized in a work by artist Michael Marcovici, this amount of money in stacks of hundred-dollar bills can fit on twelve wrapped pallets.^[2]

In terms of area:

• A billion square inches would be a square about one half mile on a side.
• A piece of finely woven bed sheet cloth that contained a billion holes would measure about 500 square feet (46 m²), large enough to cover a moderate sized apartment.

In terms of volume:

• There are a billion cubic millimeters in a cubic meter.
• A billion grains of table salt or granulated sugar would occupy a volume of about two and a half cubic feet.
• A billion cubic inches would be a volume comparable to a large commercial building slightly larger than a typical supermarket.

In terms of natural landscape; a small mountain, slightly larger than Stone Mountain Georgia, United States, would weigh (have a mass of) a billion tons.

In terms of count:

A is a cube; B consists of 1000 cubes of type A. C consists of 1000 Bs; and D 1000 Cs. Thus there are 1 million As in C; and 1,000,000,000 As in D.

References[link]