Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (Great Discoveries) | 
 enlarge | Author: David Foster Wallace
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  47 reviews
Sales Rank: 30293
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.9
ISBN: 0393326292
Dewey Decimal Number: 511.3
EAN: 9780393326291
ASIN: 0393326292
Publication Date: November 30, 2004
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
Before discussing the merits of David Foster Wallace's Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, it is essential to define what the book is not. This volume in the "Great Discoveries" series is not a history of the personalities and social conditions that led to the "discovery" of infinity. Nor is it a narrative fixated on the cultish fear of--and obsession with--the infinite that has seemingly driven mathematicians insane over the centuries. Rather, Everything and More is a surprisingly rigorous march through the 2000 plus years of mathematical research that began with Aristotle; continued through Galileo, Isaac Newton, G.W. Leibniz, Karl Weierstrass, and J.W.R. Dedekind; and culminated in Georg Cantor and his Set Theory. The task Wallace (author of the bestseller Infinite Jest and other fiction) has set himself is enormously challenging: without radically compromising the complexity of the philosophy, metaphysics, or mathematics that underlies the evolving concept of infinity, present the material to a lay audience in a manner that is entertaining. To propel his narrative, Wallace even develops a style that mirrors the mathematical language he probes. One difficulty in his focus on concepts and not a strict human chronology, though, is that his structure is dependent on frequent digressions (especially early on). Patience is required. Wallace demands that his reader walk through the equations, study the graphs and charts, and relearn college-level concepts to follow along on the exploration. Indeed, after one wrenching dip into Zenos paradoxes, Wallace spouts at his imagined complaining audience: "Deal." But the book should be deemed a success. If one grants him the attention he requires, Wallace has made the trip richly rewarding. --Patrick OKelley
Product Description
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE brings his intellectual ambition and bravura style to the story of how mathematicians have struggled to understand the infinite, from the ancient Greeks to the nineteenth-century mathematical genius Georg Cantor's counterintuitive discovery that there is more than one kind of infinity.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 42 more reviews...
 So long and thanks for all the footnotes... September 15, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Since DFW has committed suicide, we will not see an edition revised by him. In re-reading the reviews, it appears that style means a lot. I personally found the book witty. It was a little slow sometimes because of the convolutions he introduced in style, but mostly I kept plowing (and chuckling) through. The librarian who sent back the book did a disservice to some readers. Not everyone likes to learn in the same way. With that kind of attitude, many years ago I would have had Rudin's books removed as too concise to be useful. Of course, there are many mathematicians who love those books for just that reason, and I would have done them a disservice.
I am a physicist with a math minor. To me, the best part of this book was his explanation of why mathematicians insist on the epsilon-deltas of mathematical rigor. No one ever did that before. If I could have read this in high school, I probably would have finished my math major as well as my physics major. Instead, the whole epsilon-delta thing seemed ad-hoc and inexplicable in purpose. I could never accept the need for rigor demanded in advanced analysis.(a drunken prof and Rudin's book didn't help either) DFW showed how a crisis in dealing with the infinite and with infinitesmals led to the development of the what we call the foundations of analysis. Just excellent.
I envied him his high school math teacher, who seems responsible for much of the really good parts of this book. No, DFW wasn't a mathematician and he (in spite of what some reviewers seem to think) knew it. He made clear that he wouldn't be able to do justice to Godel. But incompleteness is moderate difficult. DFW didn't know much about Fourier series, but did know they were important enough to mention.
For some students, that's the way to get them interested, just mention something and let them go dig (so much easier now with the internet).
Remember the subtitle -- a compact history of infinity. So it is more history oriented than a mathematical tome. I had recently read Lillian R. Lieber's Infinity (which I see has been reprinted) and it has her sparse, but excellent development of the concepts. It doesn't have much historical detail though. So everything and more was a pleasure.
 Worst-written book I have ever read. June 25, 2008
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
I was expecting an exciting book.
I was disappointed.
This book has no chapters, lots of text message abbreviations, and many phrases ending in a period.
Three-quarters of this book is background information.
When the payoff comes, actually talking about infinities,
the reationship among alelf null, cardinality c, and alef 1
is left as a "problem for the reader" for 20 pages!
Everything and Less. March 31, 2008
5 out of 13 found this review helpful
I (and many of my professional scientist colleagues) thought Gleick's "Chaos" was one of the worst books ever written on math - so confusing and uninstructive it called the whole subject into question. So it is not surprising Gleick praises this book: it is worse than "Chaos". The grammar, punctuation, and style are so tangled I found myself rereading passage after passage to sort out Wallace's meaning. He uses dozens of obscure, undefined, unusual, and unobvious abbreviations, with the index to them lost in the text, and no index at all to the book as a whole, which is very negligent for a technical work. There is no organization into chapters, just numbered sections which do not coincide with any natural divisions in the material. "Stream-of-consciousness" writing may do for Joyce (though he was not known for lucidity), but it is hopeless for presenting technical material. Many of Wallace's explanations explain nothing: "Fourier Series is vital to understanding transfinite math", he writes, and then blows the subject off with a jest (p 115). And there are plain errors: "when n<0, (p+q)^n becomes the Binomial Theorem" (p 117). Finally, the subject-matter itself is questionable: modern mathematicians still regard infinity as an intractable concept that leads to preposterous contradictions, as Archimedes and Galileo found and as Wallace's own examples demonstrate. "Is the area of an infinitely-long and wide sheet of paper infinity squared?" "Are some infinities bigger than others?" If questions like these have cogent answers at all, it is going to take someone more coherent than Wallace to explain them.
 Poorly written and with some serious error(s) March 28, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
I suppose this might just be his style of writing but I just can't stand it. Having read 9 other math related books over the past month, this was a huge disappointment. He uses all sorts of acronyms and idiosyncrasies that just go too far. I got half way through it and then decided to skim seeing if I could find anything that caught my eye. Thinking maybe his discussion of the Continuum Hypothesis should be good, I read that. Of course, he misstated it, confusing which equality was known and which was hypothesized. This doesn't seem huge, but its just silly that in a book about infinity, DFW states one of the most important undecidable hypotheses in all of math incorrectly and actually presents something that is easily provable (c=2^N0). Why not just one star? He did get me to read 100 pages...
Please enter a title for your review February 11, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
this book offers no recommendation for what mathematical principles a reader should be familiar with before starting it but any claim of it being accessable to an average reader would be misleading.
if seems not only like no attempt was made to relate most of what is being described to any commonsense foundation, but that it was academically overwritten into a code that even someone who already knew all the information contained in the book would have trouble following. in my ironic experience the "emergency glossary" definitions themselves contain more undefined or ambiguous terms than any other part of the text.
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