The Birthday of Jorge Luis Borges (1899) – The Library of Babel

Borges was a writer who loved mathematics and infinity. His story ‘The Library of Babel’ describes a universe consisting of hexagonal rooms filled with books containing every possible combination of letters. The number of books is finite but astronomical: 25 symbols (22 letters, space, period, comma), each book 410 pages, each page 40 lines, each line 80 characters – total books = 25^(410×40×80) ≈ 10^(1,800,000). Borges explores the combinatorial explosion and the paradox of total information being meaningless noise. His work influenced many mathematicians (e.g., the idea of the ‘total library’ of all possible books).