Have You Read …?
One of the basic principles we follow in our teaching is to relate new ideas with old ideas. Dr. Forbes has done just this in his article about extending the concept of rational numbers to real numbers. He points out how this extension cannot follow the same pattern as that of extensions positive to negative integers or from integers to rationals. If we look to a definition for motivating the extension we at best can only say, “Some polynomial equations have no rational number solutions and do have some real number solutions.” We might use least-upperbound idea, or we might try motivating through nonperiodic infinite decimals. However, Dr. Forbes rejects all of these and makes the tie-in through a geometric approach.