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121 Approaching Infinity Caleb Crain/2003 From Boston Globe, 26 October 2003. © 2003 by Caleb Crain. Reprinted by permission. If there were another superpower anymore, it would probably classify David Foster Wallace’s Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞(W. W. Norton) as a Sputnik-level threat to its national security. After all, America’s intellectual vigor must be fearsome if a publisher is willing to bet that its citizens will voluntarily, recreationally, and in reasonably large numbers read a book with sentences like this: Cantor shows that P’s first derived set, P’, can be “decomposed” or broken down into the union of two different subsets, Q and R, where Q is the set of all points belonging to first-species derived sets of P’, and R is the set of all points that are contained in every single derived set of P’, meaning R is the set of just those points that all the derived sets of P’ have in common. Everything and More is not for lightweights. The book has a hero: the nineteenth-century German mathematician Georg F. L. P. Cantor, who spent the last twenty years of his life in and out of mental hospitals. But it is less Cantor’s story than the story of the problem he solved, which led him to pioneer set theory and to discover the mathematical rules that govern infinity —which, it turns out, comes in different sizes. The forty-one-year-old Wallace is probably the most important novelist of his generation, and he has fans who will follow him even into differential equations. He is the author of two story collections, a book of essays, and the 1079-page, 388-footnote novel Infinite Jest, which is set in Greater Boston (in 1989 Wallace spent a semester as a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard), and is concerned with Alcoholics Anonymous, wheelchair-bound 122 CONVERSATIONS WITH DAVID FOSTER WALLACE terrorists from Quebec, and a tennis prodigy whose late father directed a film so entertaining that it melts the minds of its viewers. A year ago Wallace left his longtime home in central Illinois to become the Roy Edward Disney Professor in Creative Writing at Pomona College in California. Last Friday he was in New York, and he met with Ideas in his hotel room to discuss infinity, Whitey Bulger, and Platonists (people who believe that math’s concepts exist independent of the mathematicians who think them). Before the interview began, Wallace, who recently quit smoking , served Ideas a glass of club soda and himself a nicotine patch. IDEAS: A few years ago, you reviewed two novels about math for the magazine Science and took them to task for not having thought through who their audience was. WALLACE: They were really dreadful books. One of them would take time to define very simple stuff like addition but would then throw around really high-level math terms. IDEAS: How do you address the question of audience in your book? WALLACE: Oh, it’s so much more fun criticizing how other people have done it. There was this book by Amir Aczel, which was about Georg Cantor ’s mental illness, and certain supposed connections between infinity and mental illness, and infinity and the kabbalah. Obviously I wanted to do something different, and the only way I could think of was to talk about where the math actually came from. The idea is, if the book works right, you finish it with a better idea of not just how Cantorian transfinite set theory works but actually why it was a big deal and why it’s beautiful and amazing. A couple of people have already said to me, “Gosh, good book but it’s really hard,” thinking that’s a compliment, and it’s not. Does it seem halfway clear to you? IDEAS: The Uniqueness Theorem lost me. WALLACE: It’s the hardest part of the book. The idea is, if you can show that all the different series that a function expands to are equivalent, then it is just one series. IDEAS: I pretty much followed the rest. WALLACE: My fondest hope is that the average reader has more or less your experience. I’m hoping that even a reader who hasn’t had a semester of college math will be able to follow enough to get why this stuff is a big deal [18.191.195...

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