• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.469-482
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• 2008

This study analysed difficult points on the understanding of infinity when the concept is considered as actual infinity or as potential infinity. And I consider examples that the concept of actual infinity is used in texts of elementary and middle school mathematics. For understanding of modem mathematics, the concept of actual infinity is required necessarily, and the intuition of potential infinity is an epistemological obstacle to get over. Even so, it might be an excessive requirement to make such epistemological rupture from the early school mathematics, since the concept of actual infinity is not intuitive, derives many paradoxes, and cannot offer any proper metaphor.