Winicki Landman G.

(2000)
Making possible the discussion of "Impossible in Mathematics".

Contribution to: Paolo Boero, G. Harel, C. Maher, M. Miyazaki (organisers) Proof

and Proving in Mathematics Education. ICME9 TSG 12. Tokyo/Makuhari, Japan.
Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."
"I dare say you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half
an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

Instead of asking students "Show that there is no...." I generally ask my students "Find
a..." without giving any additional information. The reader may consider I lied to them...
I don't. With the task formulated affirmatively, the solver will try to accomplish the task
and only after same attempts (sometimes many attempts or even never...) he will suspect
that the task is "very hard", or almost "impossible". Then, he is in front of a
metamathematical decision: to keep on trying to do what he was asked to do or to be
"insolent" and change direction trying to prove that he had been asked to do something
that is not possibly done. From an educational point of view, I think it is very important
to have mathematics students discuss the role of impossible things in mathematics.
First of all, it is necessary to acknowledge that there exist impossible "things" in
mathematics. Some of the questions that lead to such "things" were asked from antiquity
(i.e. Trisecting an angle, Doubling a cube, Squaring a circle - all of the above with
straightedge and compass alone) and the attempts to give them an answer lead to the
development of very important branches of the mathematical knowledge. Second, the
fact that there are impossible things in mathematics is quite surprising. The analysis of
results about impossibility may lead students to a more real perspective of the subject.
Third, the discussion of results of the form "It is impossible to..." may constitute a good
opportunity to clarify the distinction between unsolved problems and unsolvable
problems. As Davis said, "There seems to be a time element at work in such
[impossibility] statements. Actuality is here, actuality is now, it is complete; an
impossibility seems to bargain with an uncommitted future." (Davis, 1986, p.67)
In the frame of a course for pre service secondary school mathematics teachers, the
classic proof that there exist at most five regular solids was presented. Later on, during
the same lesson, we showed Kepler's version of the Solar System and we discussed the
connections between the Platonic Solids and the orbits of the planets. The following
dialog occurred:
S [student]: At Kepler's time only some of the planets were
known. But nowadays, we know that there are nine planets.
T [teacher]: Yes, ...
S: If so, isn't it possible that in the future anyone may discover a new regular solid?
T [to the class] What do you think?
Of course, the answer to the student's question is one and only one: if the definition of
regular solid is the one used in the presented proof, there are no more than five regular
solids, so it is impossible to find another one. For the students involved in the lesson the
word "impossible" sounded "too strong" and "very dramatic". It turned on a red light on
my head: How do they understand impossible statements? How do they prove such
statements?
To learn more about these questions, an open questionnaire was designed and delivered
to the students a week later. They were asked to think about the following questions and
to write down their opinions.
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1. What is the meaning of "impossible" in mathematics?
2. Enunciate three examples of mathematic impossible and correct
statements.
3. How do you explain to your math students that something is impossible?
4. In your opinion, do we - as mathematics educators - have to expose our students to
mathematic statements involving impossibility? If so, to what purposes? If not, why?
5. Let us define a new concept: A Centrified Triangle is a right-angle triangle whose
circumcenter is also its baricenter.
Enunciate some properties of the set of Centrified Triangles.
6. Prove or refute the following statements:
i) It is impossible for a kite to have exactly one right angle;
ii) It is impossible for a non special parallelogram to be a cyclic quadrilateral;
iii) It is impossible to find 3 collinear points in the same circle;
iv) It is impossible for a square to have a diagonal whose length is a rational number;
v) It is impossible for a straight line which is not tangent to a parabola to have only one
common point with the parabola;
vi) It is impossible for a function to be odd and even at the same time.
I'd like the reader to think about these questions before I present my analysis.
This study tries to examine students' understanding of the notion of "impossible" and
the ways in which they prove or disprove impossibility statements. Instead of discussing
their answers to the questions, a profile of four students - Abi, Bernie Carmen and Dalia
- will be presented, according to their responses to the first two questions. The other
questions will be used to give strength to the ideas.
Abi wrote that for him impossible is "when there is no object that fulfills the
requirements". He developed his ideas saying that he identified impossible with the
empty set: "If each one of the requirements is translated into the set of objects that fulfill
it, then the objects that belong to the intersection set fulfill all the requirements. If this
intersection set is empty, then I call the situation impossible." In his search for
properties of the "Centrified Triangles", Abi explicitly wrote that he identified the set of
triangles for which their baricenter is also their circumcenter as the set of equilateral
triangles. Then he follows: "Since there is no triangle that is both equilateral and
rectangle, I conclude that the set of Centrified Triangles is empty. So, it is impossible
for a triangle to be Centrified." The examples of impossibility statements Abi produced
are: " There is no triangle for which a side is equal to the sum of the other two", "Since
the solution set of the equation sin x = 2 is empty, it is impossible to find a real number
x for which sin x = 2 ", and "It is impossible to divide 5 by 0, since there is no number x
that fulfill the condition 0x = 5".
Bernie wrote that impossible is "when you cannot obtain an answer to the question,
when you cannot find a way to solve a problem, or when you cannot prove that
something indeed exists." It seems that for Bernie, impossibility is a subjective property,
meaning that some mathematical task may be impossible for him but possible for a
friend. One of the examples he mentioned was Fermat Last Theorem. and he explained
his choice: "It was impossible for almost four centuries, but now it is possible". It may
be important to point out that the impossibility Bernie wrote about is not the same as the
impossibility that Fermat himself wrote about. Fermat wrote in Latin: "On the other
hand, it is impossible for a cube to be written as a sum of two cubes or a fourth power to
be written as a sum of two fourth powers or, in general for any number which is a power
greater than the second to be written as a sum of two like powers. For this I have
discovered a truly wonderful proof, but the margin [in his copy of Diaphantous'
Arithmetica] is too small to contain it." (as quoted by Young, 1992, p.42). Fermat wrote
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about the non-existence of three integers that fulfill certain requirements and Bernie was
thinking about the fact that the problem was open. It seems that this student confused
the terms "unsolved" and "unsolvable".
When Bernie was asked how to prove that a result is impossible he wrote: "I don't know
if you can do that at all... You only prove positive statements. I think you cannot prove
that something is impossible. If you prove something, then it may be, it may exist. So, I
think it is impossible to prove that something is impossible".
Carmen wrote that - for her - impossible is "something that contradicts mathematics
laws, principles and definitions, something that if you do it, it leads you to an absurd,
something you cannot do in a specific framework of definitions, axioms and theorems."
In Carmen words, very important aspects of the impossibility in mathematics may be
identified: the contradiction to the structure built and the relativity of the notion
possibility-impossibility to the system of axioms and definitions chosen. One of the
examples of impossibility she mentiones was "It is impossible to take the square root of
a negative number if you are talking about Real numbers. If you think about the
Complex Numbers, it is a different story. The same idea is true if you think about other
operations defined in more simple sets. For example, you cannot substract 10 from 7 if
you are thinking of natural numbers. This operation is impossible in N but possible in
Z". The other example she gave was no less interesting and rich: "Let's think about two
classical problems: Squaring the Circle or Trisecting the Angle. These results are
impossible if the tools allowed are the Euclidean Tools, but with other tools these
problems are solved, for example you may trisect any angle with the help of the
trisectrix.
Dalia wrote that it is impossible "To prove an axiom or to define a fundamental
concept". Her example does not belong to the same category of the other mentioned
examples. She wrote about an impossibility statement of the language in which
mathematics is written, while the other examples are theorems of mathematics (Davis,
1986, p.68). One of the examples she presented was "It is impossible for two parallel
lines too meet" In this case, it seems she used the definition of "parallel lines" and built
a statement of the form "It is not the case...". This algorithm to built an impossibility
statement in mathematics was frequent among other students too.
This four cases are going to be the protagonists of the session.

Reference
Davis P.J. (1986) When Mathematics Says No Mathematics Magazine 59(2) 67-76
Young R.M. (1992) Excursions in Calculus - An Interplay of the Continuous and the
Discrete Dolciani Mathematical Expositions Number 13, M.A.A.