everything and more: a compact history of infinity (great discoveries)
Buy Cheap Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (Great Discoveries) 
Buy Low Price From Here Now
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 the series: W. W. Norton and Atlas Books announce the launch of an exciting new seriesâGreat Discoveriesâbringing together renowned writers from diverse backgrounds to tell the stories of crucial scientific breakthroughsâthe great discoveries that have gone on to transform our view of the world……..
Readmore
Technical Details
2010-01-26
By M. Gawryk (Chicago)
this book makes crazy on my face. very nice and getting good product of clean with no faults. No, really, I’m quite happy with the purchase , the author, the seller, your site, my life, my head space and most of all: you, reading this.
2009-01-24
By B. Svalberg
David Foster Wallace’s “Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity” is a rare achievement. He has written a compelling and entertaining popular math book that illuminates a difficult subject. The important concepts, no matter how difficult, are explained in a fashion that is understandable by even those without advanced degrees in mathematics.
For thoughtful, engaged readers Wallace elevates and enlightens. I thoroughly recommend this book to all.
2008-09-15
By Baslim the Beggar (Ventura County, California)
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.
2008-06-25
By Dranoel (Berkeley Hts, NJ)
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!
2008-03-31
By Andrew Charig (Princeton, NJ USA)
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.
Images Product
Buy Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (Great Discoveries) Now
