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Who’s afraid of the measuring numbers?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2016

John Cable
John Cable*
Affiliation:
Bedfordshire Education Service, Kempston Manor, Bedford
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Extract

The term measuring number is acquiring currency as a popular synonym for non-negative real number. This is good. Yet the belief persists that the real numbers, by whatever name, must remain fundamentally inaccessible to school children, obscured behind a veil of Dedekind cuts or Cauchy sequences. (Thus Griffiths and Howson, in what is generally a humane book [1], devote several pages to an ingenious, but ultimately condescending, attempt to foreshadow the mysteries of real numbers in terms of points of a line.)

Type
Research Article
Information
The Mathematical Gazette , Volume 60 , Issue 412 , June 1976 , pp. 81 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © Mathematical Association 1976

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References

1. Griffiths, H. B. and Howson, A. G., Mathematics: society and curricula. Cambridge University Press (1974).Google Scholar
2. Mathematics: eleven to sixteen. Bell, for the Mathematical Association (1974).Google Scholar
3. Rees, Ruth, Mathematics: difficult—or made difficult?, in Mathematical needs of school leavers entering employment. Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (1975).Google Scholar
4. Bausor, John, Symbols and how scientists use them, Mathl Gaz. 59, 70–78 (No. 408, June 1975).Google Scholar
5. Bausor, John, Mathematics and science: uneasy truce or open hostilities?, Maths Teaching 68, 32–41 (September 1974).Google Scholar