Numbers that are significantly larger than those typically used in everyday life, for instance in simple counting or in monetary transactions, appear frequently in fields such as mathematics, cosmology, cryptography, and statistical mechanics. The term typically refers to large positive integers, or more generally, large positive real numbers, but it may also be used in other contexts. The study of nomenclature and properties of large numbers is sometimes called googology.Sometimes people refer to large numbers as being "astronomically large;" however, it is easy to mathematically define numbers that are much larger even than those used in astronomy.