Behold the solution to The Wright Challenge: Beyond the Puzzledome #1.   If you forgot the actual question, click here to see it again.

One way to do this problem is to merely multiply out 50!  You get

50! = 30,414,093,201,713,378,043,612,608,166,064,768,844,377,641,568,960,512,000,000,000,000

And that gives us 12 zeros.

Here's another way:  Pretend you have factored 50!.  There will be plenty of factors of two.  The thing will be lousy with factors of two.  So we just need count the factors of five. Since we get a zero at the end for every 5 & 2 pair, the number of factors of five will be the number of ending zeros.  

10, 20, 30, 40 each give us one factor of five.
5, 15, 35, 45 each give us one factor of five.
25, 50 each give us two factors of five.
So we have a total of 12 factors of five, or 12 zeros at the end.

When Doctor E asked for the title of  a famous novel in which a young man is forced to get into a fight with strangers immediately before giving a speech to a group of local businessmen, he was referring to Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.  Of course, people emailed in different novels, some of which I, your humble web-page designer, have not read.  Doctor E has read almost every classic novel, of course, but he is currently on vacation in Ibzia and not answering his cell phone.

So I'll tell you what - if you submitted the name of a different novel, and email a valid reason that your novel was an alternative correct answer, you will get the point for this question.