Room 9 of 11 · Upper floor
The Count
“Is counting the same as knowing?”
Lamp waiting
▶ Hear the storyteller tell this roomLook
Ten stepping stones cross a small patch of floor.
Try
Count the stones. Then look around.
Notice
Try the experiment first. Then this will fill in.
What keeps this room working?
The counted pieces really belong to a larger space.
What would break this room?
If counting the visible pieces meant you understood the whole hall.
Child-sized version
“Counting everything you can see is not the same as knowing everything.”
Try to break the room
For grown-upsShow me the math
Ten stones are countable. The hall around them is not made of stones. A finite sample can be exactly right and still not be the space it was drawn from.
- Discrete versus continuous
- Stones come one at a time. The floor between them does not.
- Sample
- A finite handful taken from a larger space.
- Dimension
- A line of stones has one direction. The hall has more.