The Fun Math Behind Alphabet’s $5 Billion Stock Buyback - Digits - WSJ

N is for nerd

"It’s not the first time Google has played around with formulas to make decisions about its finances — or even its name.

The name Google is a play on googol, which is the number 1 followed by a hundred zeroes. When it first filed to go public, it said it planned to raise $2,718,281,828, a billion times the value of “e,” an important mathematical concept in calculus.

Nearly a year later, it said it was going to sell 14.2 million shares of stock. Well, not exactly 14.2 million, but 14,159,265, the numbers that follow the decimal in pi. And when the company made a move to buy Nortel Network patents, one of its bids was actually “pi” — around $3.14 billion. (Its other bids were plays on numbers, too; Google lost the bid.)"

The Fun Math Behind Alphabet’s $5 Billion Stock Buyback - Digits - WSJ