# Sharing Kelsey Houston-Edwards’s Axiom of Choice video with kids

Kelsey Houston-Edwards has a new video out about the Axiom of Choice:

The video is amazing (as usual) and I wanted to be able to share it with the boys. This one is a bit hard than usual – the topic is pretty advanced to begin with and is also pretty far outside of my own knowledge – but we gave it a shot.

Here’s what the boys thought after seeing the video:

Next we reviewed how Houston-Edwards divided the numbers from 0 to 1 into buckets. The boys didn’t quite have the details right, but that actually made talking through the idea pretty easy – I learned from their explanation what points needed to be re-emphasized.

Now we talked through the really challenging part of the video -> creating the set with no size. Given the challenge of explaining this idea to kids, I’m pretty happy with how the conversation went here. Also, I only finally understood the argument myself while I was explaining it to them!

Now we backed away from the complexity of the Axiom of Choice and reviewed two other slightly easier ideas that came up in our discussion. Here we discuss why $\sqrt{2}$ is irrational:

Finally, we wrapped up by discussing why the rational numbers are countable:

Although kids will have a hard time understanding all of the ideas that Kelsey Houston-Edwards brings up in her Axiom of Choice video, I think it is fun to see which ideas grab their attention. The idea that you can have a set that doesn’t have a size is pretty amazing. I was pretty happy with how things went today – exploring the ultra complex idea first and then backing off to discuss slightly easier ideas involving infinity. Definitely a fun set of ideas to plant in the minds of younger kids 🙂

## One thought on “Sharing Kelsey Houston-Edwards’s Axiom of Choice video with kids”

1. So cool to see young people even tackling this sort of material! (reminds me a bit, though different, of teaching 5+ yr.-olds concepts of ‘calculus’); especially like the discussion in video #3 of the “shifts” which had me confused in Kelsey’s take.