Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (Great Discoveries (Hardcover)) - Hardcover

Wallace, David Foster

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393003388 ISBN 13: 9780393003383

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003

Synopsis

The best-selling author of Infinite Jest on the two-thousand-year-old quest to understand infinity.

One of the outstanding voices of his generation, David Foster Wallace has won a large and devoted following for the intellectual ambition and bravura style of his fiction and essays. Now he brings his considerable talents to the history of one of math's most enduring puzzles: the seemingly paradoxical nature of infinity.

Is infinity a valid mathematical property or a meaningless abstraction? The nineteenth-century mathematical genius Georg Cantor's answer to this question not only surprised him but also shook the very foundations upon which math had been built. Cantor's counterintuitive discovery of a progression of larger and larger infinities created controversy in his time and may have hastened his mental breakdown, but it also helped lead to the development of set theory, analytic philosophy, and even computer technology.

Smart, challenging, and thoroughly rewarding, Wallace's tour de force brings immediate and high-profile recognition to the bizarre and fascinating world of higher mathematics.

About this title

About the Author

David Foster Wallace (1962―2008) is the author of Infinite Jest, Girl with Curious Hair, Everything and More, The Broom of the System, and other fiction and nonfiction. Among his honors, he received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Whiting Writers' Award.

Reviews

The subject of infinity would probably strike most readers familiar with Wallace as perfectly suited to his recursive style, and this book is as weird and wonderful as you'd expect. There are footnotes galore, frequently prefaced by the acronym IYI ("If You're Interested"), which can signal either pure digression or the first hint of an idea more fully developed in later chapters. Among other textual idiosyncrasies is the constant use of the lemniscate instead of the word "infinity," emphasizing that this is "not just an incredibly, unbelievably enormous number" but an abstraction beyond what we normally conceive of when we contemplate numbers. Abstraction is one of Wallace's main themes, particularly how the mathematics of infinity goes squarely against our instinct to avoid abstract thought. The ancient Greeks couldn't handle infinity, he points out, because they loathed abstraction. Later mathematicians fared better, and though the emphasis is on Georg Cantor, all the milestones are treated in turn. Wallace appreciates that infinity can be a "skullclutcher," and though the book isn't exactly easy going, he guides readers through the math gently, including emergency glossaries when necessary. He has an obvious enthusiasm for the subject, inspired by a high school teacher whose presence is felt at irregular intervals. Had he not pursued a career in literary fiction, it's not difficult to imagine Wallace as a historian of science, producing quirky and challenging volumes such as this every few years.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

*Starred Review* In his previous books--Infinite Jest (1996), A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997)--Wallace has displayed dazzling intellect, keen wit, and a fondness for footnotes. But not even his biggest fans could have suspected that Wallace could write a clever, extensively footnoted, and shockingly readable introduction to the philosophical, historical, and mathematical significance of the concept of infinity. He begins with ancient understandings of infinity, paying special attention to Xeno and Aristotle, the latter of whom he describes as being "sort of grandly and breathtakingly wrong, always and everywhere, when it comes to infinity." As the story culminates in Georg Cantor's worldview-shattering breakthroughs, the math becomes devilishly abstract, but Wallace's colloquial style makes it a relatively easy transition from the simple abstraction of numbers (i.e., that five represents something more than five apples or five oranges) into the mind-bending abstractions of transfinite numbers. Though readers with some college math will certainly find this less intimidating, the prose is so engaging, and the underlying metaphysical arguments so fascinating, that even this reviewer (who gave up on math entirely after a C-minus in pre-calc) got lost only a few times. A brilliant antidote both to boring math textbooks and to pop-culture math books that emphasize the discoverer over the discovery. John Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393003388
• ISBN 13: 9780393003383
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 332