[ExI] dicovery of irrational numbers

[Anders Sandberg]

Cool. I just tried to demonstrate electric circuits for my brother's 
kids. Piece of advice: make sure you have flexible and easy to handle 
wires. And getting small lightbulbs is getting hard (torch lightbulbs 
are still sold here). However, they liked decoding resistors and my 
brother did a neat setup with the LEDs I bought. I also electrolysed 
some water.

On 2013-12-18 18:58, spike wrote:
>
> I am open to suggestion for how to present irrationals in a more 
> friendly way, especially since I have more bad news for that lad: most 
> numbers are irrational.  Depending on how you count them of course.  
> There are infinitely many rationals of course, but there are infinely 
> many more irrationals, since you can give me **any** two rational 
> numbers and I can give you infinitely many irrationals that fit 
> between them, larger than the smaller and smaller than the larger. Of 
> course, I can also give you infinitely many rational that fit between 
> the two as well, but between each of those between the two are 
> infinitely many irrationals.
>
>

I would do an exploration of the number line. Go through the fractions 
and plot them, so he can see the neat pattern they form. And that there 
are always gaps - between every two rationals there will be space for 
some (indeed, a lot) of irrationals.

Incidentally, anybody who has a good idea for how to make an adjustable 
Faraday cage to experiment with a tunable (and repeatable) bad reception 
environment for a cellphone?

-- 
Dr Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University

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