Librarian Berry, after ruminating about the subtle nature of the search for ever shorter descriptions, came up with a devilish characterization of a very special number, which I’ll dub b in his honor: b is the smallest integer whose English-language descriptions always use at least thirty syllables. In other words, b has no precise characterization shorter than thirty syllables. Since it always takes such a large number of syllables to describe it, we know that b must be a huge integer. Just how big, roughly, would b be?
