Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

This is true until you introduce transfinite numbers.


That might be a bit too advanced for a 6 year old perhaps.


On the contrary, it's entirely natural. The technical definition is quite intuitive.

"There are many infinities! The smallest one is bigger than all the counting numbers, so you can't count up to it, but it's out there! We call it omega. You can make bigger infinities too, like omega + 1!"

Kids LOVE that, and it's good math too! (But gets tricky quickly, because addition of transfinite ordinals is not commutative, and standard transfinite ordinals don't allow subtraction)

It's easy to draw as a "number tree" too:

            root
        /         \
       /           \
    1,2,3,4...     omega, omega+1,...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surreal_number#/media/File:Sur... (includes more numbers like rationals and reals and negatives and backwards counting from omega, but you can ignore those)


>On the contrary, it's entirely natural. The technical definition is quite intuitive.

https://xkcd.com/2501/


Terminology and strict definitions aside, it is quite intuitive. A commenter below also pointers this out:

> If you ask a child what comes after infinity, "Infinity + 1" is pretty much the default answer. Any kid who knows multiplication knows "Infinity + Infinity" is the same as "Infinity Times Two". The answer of "Infinity TIMES Infinity" is also popular for kids to say when they know a number bigger than their friend (who just proclaimed infinity is the largest number).


6 year olds have an expert understanding in "I'm not touching you", so you might have a shot of teaching them




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: