[Lonely Bull]

The article makes a huge mistake. There are not 10,500 different solutions to string theory, I believe the solutions are related to the number of ways to fold the extra dimensions string theory requires, but 10 to the power of 500, i.e., 10 followed by 500 zeroes.

Some searching online supports what you're thinking (a little note: this number is 1 followed by 500 zeroes). I see the larger number used a lot, and I also see a small set of examples that used "10,500" instead, some of which were corrected.

I wonder if some writers saw "10500" instead (bad eyes, bad text, ignorance), and other writers saw "10^500" and misread that one or thought "this caret is a typo and must actually be a comma."

[katana]

Ten to the 500th power would be the number 1 followed by so many zeroes that any difference between their number and infinity is meaningless. Ten x ten x ten out to total of five hundred tens. Whoever wrote the article dropped out of math class or slept through the really interesting bits, and probably should have selected a different topic.