## Talking though Richard Evan Schwartz’s Gallery of the Infinite with kids

We received Richard Evan Schwartz’s Gallery of the Infinite in the mail this week:

I thought that the boys would love reading the book and asked them to each read it twice prior to today’s project. Here are some of the things that they thought were interesting (ugh, sorry for the focus problems . . . .) :

The first thing the boys wanted to talk about was the “smallest” infinity -> $\aleph_0$. Here we talked about that infinity and other sets of integers that were the same size.

Next we moved on to talk about the rational numbers – we had a good time talking through the argument that the “size” of the rational numbers was the same as the positive integers.

This argument is represented in the book by a painting of a shark!

Now my older son wanted to talk about Cantor’s diagonal argument. He was a little confused about the arguments presented in the book, but we (hopefully) got things straightened out. I think this shows kids can find ideas about infinity to be really interesting.

Finally, we wrapped up by talking about the implications of the infinity of binary strings being larger than the infinity of counting numbers.

Definitely a fun project. I love the content of the book and so do the kids. The only problem is that the quality of the binding is awful and although we’ve only had the book for a few days, it is falling to pieces. Boo 😦