Sharing Kelsey Houston-Edwards’s video about Pi and e with kids

Yesterday I a new video from Kelsey Houston-Edwards that just blew me away. At this point I don’t have the words to describe how much I admire her work. What she is doing to make challenging, high level math both accessible and fun for everyone is amazing.

The new video was about this question on Math Overflow from Erin Carmody:

If I exchange Infinitely many digits of Pi and E are the two resulting numbers transendental?

Before showing the boys Houston-Edwards’s video, I wanted to see what they thought about the question. So, we just dove in:

Next, I took a great warm up idea from Houston-Edwards’s video and asked the boys if they could find *any* two irrational numbers that you could use to swap digits and produce a rational number.

Now, with that little bit of prep work, we watched the new video:

After the video we talked about what we learned. I think just tiny bit of prep work we did really helped the boys get a lot more out of the video.

One of the fun little challenge questions from the video was to show that (assuming and differ in infinitely many digits, then you will produce uncountably many different numbers by swapping different digits. I didn’t expect that the boys would be able to construct this proof, so I gave them a sketch of how I thought about it (and hopefully my idea was right . . . . )

I think that kids will find the ideas in Houston-Edward’s new video to be fascinating. It is so fun (and sadly so rare) to be able to share ideas that are genuinely interesting to professional mathematicians with kids. As always, I can’t wait for next week’s PBS Infinite series video!