Using the work of Jorge Luis Borges to identify and confront students’ misconceptions about infinity

In this article, we present a teaching design that uses the short story called The Library of Babel written by Jorge Luis Borges. The purpose of this didactic design was to identify and confront students' misconceptions about infinity. During the implementation of the teaching design, a misconception about infinity was identified, one where students equate very large quantities with infinity. As part of the design, students were orientated to discover by themselves that such conception of infinity is not adequate. Some students managed to notice this inconsistency, but in other cases the misconception persisted. This work represents a contribution to the efforts that have been made to use literary works as a tool to foster high school students’ understanding of mathematical notions.