(related - and I enjoyed the vibe he put into it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrU9YDoXE88 - Vsauce's "How to Count Past Infinity"
How to explain infinity to kids
61–70 of 139 posts
Re: How to explain infinity to kids
#62I am not a mathematician, but I know that at least in standard mathematics it is fairly ill-advised to treat infinity implicitly as a number. Doing so can result in various contradictions (two different seemingly valid solutions to a problem). It should be thought of as a property of a process, i.e. for any number x you can change the process so that it results in a number greater than x. One example of infinity migh…
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Re: How to explain infinity to kids
#63Or you could raise them as ultrafinitists [1]!
Re: How to explain infinity to kids
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Shudder. I consider the "teaching is lying" meme to be vile . Couldn't agree more. And when I read this in the article I also thought of high school chemistry even before I read your comment. I was put off chemistry in high school precisely because of its incoherence. The best thing to do, as always, is to be honest. Tell your students that what you are teaching them is a simplification; a model that is useful at t…
The approach in this article is to give a "technically unimpeachable" definition. It doesn't involve any lies.
My comment, and I believe the one I replied to, is directed at the first paragraph in this piece, which is about the idea of teaching as 'a process of lying' and one which the author agrees with 'in principle'.
I also do not like his suggested definition. It comes across as smartarse-ish and I think most children would feel the same way.
Re: How to explain infinity to kids
#65Just give them two mirrors and then play.
Re: How to explain infinity to kids
#66I don't understand this explanation, and I'm an adult with an interest in mathematics and a degree in software development (although not mathematical per se, they usually go hand-in-hand). I like how "w" is the smallest number you cannot count to - if I understand it right it's almost 0 but not quite - but I don't understand the bonus questions and answers. If this is the best "explain it like I'm 5" explanation of i…
> Heck, even the concept of "never ending" seems simpler to me.
This is actually the definition that the Simple English wikipedia article [1] gives. The very first sentence in that article:
> Infinity is about things which never end.
Re: How to explain infinity to kids
#67A professor of mine once said to me that all teaching was a process of lying, and then of replacing the lies with successively better approximations of the truth.
This is the opposite of what Feynman thought. He said, and I agree, something like "the hard part about teaching is making concepts simple without saying things that are false." The whole challenge of teaching is NOT lying, but instead saying simple things that are still true.
That said, I see the appeal of choosing omega.
Re: How to explain infinity to kids
#68I got excited because I thought that I might finally understand infinity. Unfortunately I am still not there as I am not there with quantum mechanics. I have read many books on both with equal non-success.
Re: How to explain infinity to kids
#69If we're going for useful lies to tide kids over, I quite like the explanation in the Postgres docs: > infinity (date, timestamp) later than all other time stamps I think you could tell a kid who wasn't quite ready for Aleph numbers that: > infinity is a useful made-up number that's bigger than all other numbers Which is useful when kids first hear about it, I guess. I think my first "practical" introduction to infin…
> infinity is a useful made-up number that's bigger than all other numbers
I love the emphasis on this being a choice, and I wish this kind of thinking was taught more in math. So many math explanations act like these things are immutable facts of the universe, rather than human constructions. We lose some of the history and character of math when we teach it as law rather than invention.
Zero is also a useful made-up number, and it didn’t always exist as a concept. We understand 0 so deeply now, it’s not longer possible to imagine a world without that idea. Another fun one, 0^0 gets defined (chosen) to be 1 sometimes, because it makes other formulas work out, not because it’s the correct or only answer.
Re: How to explain infinity to kids
#70[deleted]