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.

Author: David Foster Wallace
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 10/01/2003
Series: Great Discoveries (Hardcover)
Pages: 332
Weight: 1.25lbs
Size: 8.60h x 5.90w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780393003383
And Edition


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 06/15/2003 pg. 54
Vanity Fair 10/01/2003 pg. 106
Entertainment Weekly 10/10/2003 pg. 127
Publishers Weekly 10/13/2003 pg. 71
Booklist 10/15/2003 pg. 366
Library Journal 11/01/2003 pg. 120
New Yorker (The) 11/03/2003 pg. 84
New York Times 11/16/2003 pg. 54
Library Journal 03/01/2004 pg. 40
Choice 07/01/2004 pg. 2081
Library Journal 06/15/2003
New York Review of Books 05/12/2011 pg. 8

About the Author
Wallace, David Foster: - 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.