Great Discoveries (Hardcover)

A Compact History of Infinity

By: David Foster Wallace

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Hardcover | 1 October 2003

At a Glance

Hardcover
332 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.59 x 13.97 x 2.24

Hardcover

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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.

Industry Reviews

"A gripping guide to the modern taming of the infinite." -- New York Times Book Review "Everything and More is, in nearly every way, a gift. It's a thoughtful and witty 300-page testimonial to the qualities I never fully understood that mathematics possessed: Math is astonishing and full of 'shadowlands,' and-ultimately-stunning beauty." -- Anthony Doerr - Boston Globe "[Wallace] brings to his task a refreshingly conversational style as well as a surprisingly authoritative command of mathematics...A success." -- John Allen Paulos - The American Scholar "Shockingly readable...A brilliant antidote both to boring math textbooks and to pop-culture math books that emphasize the discoverer over the discovery." -- Booklist

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