My younger son has been learning a little bit about square roots over the last couple of weeks and I thought it would be fun to show him some proofs that the square root of 2 is irrational. Because this conversation was going to explore some ideas in math that are both important and pretty neat, I asked my older son to join it.
I wasn’t super happy with how this little project went – it felt a bit rushed while we were going through it. Hopefully a few of the ideas stuck.
We started by talking about the square root of 2 and what basic properties the boys already knew about it:
After that short introduction we moved on to the first proof that the square root of 2 is irrational – I think this is probably the most well-known proof. The proof is by contradiction and starts by assuming that 
The next proof is a geometric proof that I learned a few years ago from Alexander Bogomolny’s wonderful site Cut The Knot. It is proof 8”’ here:
Proof 8”’ that the square root of 2 is irrational on Cut the Knot’s site
If you like this proof, we have also explored some geometric infinite descent proofs in a slightly different setting previously inspired by a really neat post from Jim Propp:
An infinite descent problem with pentagons
Finally, we looked at a proof that uses continued fractions. It has been a while since I talked about continued fractions with the boys, and will probably actually revisit the topic soon. It is one of my favorite topics and always reminds me of how lucky I was to have Mr. Waterman for my math teacher in high school. He loved exploring fun and non-standard topics like continued fractions.
So, although I don’t go deeply into all of the continued fraction ideas here – hopefully there’s enough here to show you that the continued fraction for the
So, although this one didn’t go quite as well as I was hoping, I still loved showing the boys these ideas. We’ll explore them more deeply as we study some basic ideas in proof over the next year.
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