About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherNorton & Company, Incorporated, w. w.

ISBN-100393326292

ISBN-139780393326291

eBay Product ID (ePID)30785890

Product Key Features

Number of Pages368 Pages

Publication NameEverything and more : a Compact History of Infinity

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2004

SubjectInfinity

TypeTextbook

AuthorDavid Foster Wallace

Subject AreaMathematics

SeriesGreat Discoveries Ser.

FormatTrade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Height0.9 in

Item Weight10.9 Oz

Item Length7.9 in

Item Width5.2 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

LCCN2003-011415

Dewey Edition21

Series Volume Number0

Dewey Decimal511.3

SynopsisOne 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., 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.

LC Classification NumberQA9.W335 2003