Annals Of Mathematical Nomenclature

“’Yotta’, ‘zeta’, ‘exa’ and ‘peta’ could now be joined by a new number prefix, the ‘hella’, if a physics student from University of California, Davis, gets his way. Austin Sendek has started a petition on the social networking site Facebook to establish a new, scientifically accepted prefix for [10 to the twenty-seventh power] (that is 1 followed by 27 zeroes, or 1000000000000000000000000000)…. ‘Hella’ comes from Californian slang for ‘very’ or ‘a lot of’. Sendek says that by accepting the term the SI system can ‘not only rectify their failing prefix system but also honor the scientific progress of Northern California.’”