Counting On-To Infinity And Beyond
My latest writing project is a picture book, for children, about counting and infinity.
The above quotation from Jane Kitchen inspires me. Counting rules, I replied. It really does. The Count from Sesame Street knew that, Cantor knew that, kids all around us know it.
Having two small children, here are a few things I know:
- the “rote” counting sequence is “in the air” around children from birth. Almost as soon as they can talk, they start to count.
- counting has some very large ideas attached to it, which come in to play when dealing with much larger numbers, like the cardinality of a set. Small children learn that the last number the count, if they are counting a set, of, say, Hot Wheels, is the number of objects in that set.
- children love to count. They love the sing-songy nature of reciting the number sequence. This is a very real and true example of rote learning. (Teachers, later, check for how kids understand how they are counting, and help them to count in more powerful ways, which we call arithmetic.
- children begin to identify “one, two, many” very early-as babies. They can say “how many”, after they learn to count. This innate numerosity is not just in humans. Some animals have it too, although, do sheep dream of infinity?
- Paul Lockhart, in his brilliant book Arithmetic, defines arithmetic as a form of counting. Basically, the operations allow us to count more efficiently, quickly, and to get much higher numbers than we could ever count to.
- small children have some burgeoning sense of infinity. I won’t go so far as to call it “innate”, although it may well be. They are fascinated by the idea of the “last number”.
- some adventurous counters believe they can count “beyond infinity”, a fallacy, but so tempting. If infinity was a number…we could just keep going…infinity and one, infinity and two…
Do sheep dream of infinity, while they sleep?
The book, still in draft form, is a conversation between father and son about counting and numbers. It is about the infiniteness of love, which is the only true infinity-definable, yet mysterious. Love has no cardinality, no boundaries. Or rather, when we think we have reached its limits, with our families, our children, we can always go beyond.
Love is the only true infinity.
This book, therefore, is a mash-up between a counting book, and a “parent love” book. When it comes out, I hope you read it. (It still needs a publisher’s home, but all in time. We don’t have “infinity time”, but we have time, in life, to work on and finish our creative projects…)
~@MatthewOldridge is, above all else, a husband and father.
Infinity is love.
~Boundless, infinite, like the stars… ~
