"I can stretch a greenback dollar from here to Kingdom Come. I can play the numbers, pay my bills, an' still end up with some . . ."

- Jerry Lieber, lyrics to I'm a Woman

MATHEMATICIANS spend their lives studying numbers and are equipped with the tools to understand them in conceptual, if not practical, terms. Arcane relationships between numbers are relatively simple fodder for such souls, such as a friend of mine who is a chartered mathematician.

For the rest of us, numbers exert varying degrees of fascination. Love them or hate them, numbers run our lives, whether it's the numbers on the phone bill, the numbers on the face of a clock, the number of goals scored by the Goat, or the number of pounds that show up on the scales when we weigh ourselves.

There is one aspect of numbers, relevant to Bermuda, that has always struck me as a conundrum, and it might best be expressed thus: What is the biggest defined number of anything that you've ever seen? I have a reason for asking, and we'll get to it in due course.

By largest number, I don't mean the number of grains of sand on the beach you were lying on last summer. That number is incalculable. The number of beaches was one, the temperature was 90 degrees, and that's all you need to know.

I'll answer the question to help you do the same. I used to attend football games at Wembley Stadium, England's national sports centre in London. For the important games, the stadium would sell out, which meant that 100,000 people were inside. From the cheap stands (the number of pounds in my pocket dictating my vantage point), I could see the entire contents of the stadium. I can therefore say, with some confidence, that the largest defined number I have ever seen is 100,000, give or take.

One hundred thousand was a lot of people. Standing in neat sections of 1,000, they gave meaning to the number 100,000 in a manner that, all these years later, I can still vividly recall.

You may be able to think of a similar occasion on which you were in the presence of a very large number of something, be it people or cans of dog food (if you work in a very large warehouse), but I doubt your number would be very much larger than mine. I wonder whether the human brain can wrap itself around huge numbers.

I have been part of larger crowds, at concerts, say. Half a million reportedly attended a Rolling Stones concert in Hyde Park that I was at, and have seen aerial photographs of the crowd. "By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong," the song lyric has it, and I have seen photos of that crowd, too.

But half a million is not much larger than 100,000, in the grand scale of things, and this leads me to the point.

After September 11, 2001, several companies formed in Bermuda with capital of a billion dollars or more. Among companies in existence in Bermuda before that dreadful day, ACE (to choose one such company) has assets of about $40 billion, and AIG, the world's largest financial services company and a long-time Bermuda resident, has assets in excess of $500 billion.

My point is: How do you manage numbers so big that you cannot comprehend them? If you were Maurice (Hank) Greenberg, long-time head of AIG, how would you manage its $500 billion of assets? How does Brian Duperreault, head of ACE, think of the $40 billion at his command? In Mr. Greenberg's case, to spell it out, the number of his assets is greater than $500,000,000,000, a number I can barely type, let alone understand.

I cannot speak for either gentleman, but I can speak for others, because I have asked them. For years, whenever I interviewed a businessman who dealt in millions or billions, I would ask the question. I got some odd looks, but the answer was always the same. You don't think of $500 billion one dollar at a time, as you might do if considering spending six bucks on a cheeseburger. You think of them one thousand, or one billion, at a time, depending on the circumstances.

Thus, when thinking of assets, it's the "500", rather than the "billion", that Mr. Greenberg deals with. When he's thinking about his net worth of a few billion dollars, he focuses more on the "few" than on the "billion". But when he buys a newspaper (if he ever does such a thing) and pays it with a $10 note, he counts the change in ones, rather than in fractions of a billion.

That probably seems very obvious, now that I've spent 20 years thinking about and boiled it down for you. But I find it marvellous, in a lot of ways, the simple reduction of impossibly large numbers to something simple.

It's the same process that NASA scientists follow when calculating the vast distances and time spans of space, the same process that we all follow at some time or another, swinging from thinking in ones to millions or billions, and then back to tens again as the situation demands.

CLEVER as human beings think they are, we are not much more than superannuated monkeys. Yet we have the great facility of being able to switch, in a split second, from considering AIG's assets in hundreds of billions to deciding whether to take one or two lumps of sugar in our coffee, and never once saying, "I'd like two billion lumps, please."

Before long, AIG's assets will exceed a trillion dollars, as the US budget has. A trillion dollars is $1,000,000,000,000, a number far bigger than any of us can really comprehend. Down on Richmond Road, if anyone ever considers such things, they will adapt. They will talk of assets exceeding "a thousand billion" for a while, and then, in due course, it will become "1.2" or "1.4", a simple number representing a huge, incomprehensible number. In the years to come, assuming the world and AIG survive, future generations will speak of quadrillions and quintillions of dollars in much the same way.

That's all I had to say, except that now you know what 1,028 looks like: it's the number of words in this article.