Author: David Foster WallacePublish On: 2010-10-04
The contributions to this volume of conference papers combine approaches from history and literature studies in order to review the changing forms and fields of the establishment of collective identities, and to analyse them in their mutual ...
Author: David Foster Wallace
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393339284
Category: Mathematics
Page: 344
View: 754
The bestselling author of "Infinite Jest" takes on the 2,000 year-old quest to understand infinity. Wallace brings his considerable talents to the history of one of math's most enduring puzzles: the seemingly paradoxical nature of infinity.
Author: David Foster WallacePublish On: 2010-10-04
Featuring an introduction by Neal Stephenson, this edition is a perfect introduction to the beauty of mathematics and the undeniable strangeness of the infinite.
Author: David Foster Wallace
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393241990
Category: Mathematics
Page: 384
View: 726
"A gripping guide to the modern taming of the infinite."—The New York Times. With a new introduction by Neal Stephenson. Is infinity a valid mathematical property or a meaningless abstraction? David Foster Wallace brings his intellectual ambition and characteristic 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 was more than one kind of infinity. 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.
In particular, Cantor¿s counterintuitive discovery of a progression of larger and larger infinities was both enormously controversial and mind-bendingly beautiful -- a glimpse of a strange landscape where the everyday rules of arithmetic ...
Author: David Foster WallacePublish On: 2004-05-25
Published when Wallace was just twenty-four years old, The Broom of the System stunned critics and marked the emergence of an extraordinary new talent.
Author: David Foster Wallace
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 9781101153536
Category: Fiction
Page: 480
View: 440
Published when Wallace was just twenty-four years old, The Broom of the System stunned critics and marked the emergence of an extraordinary new talent. At the center of this outlandishly funny, fiercely intelligent novel is the bewitching heroine, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman. The year is 1990 and the place is a slightly altered Cleveland, Ohio. Lenore’s great-grandmother has disappeared with twenty-five other inmates of the Shaker Heights Nursing Home. Her beau, and boss, Rick Vigorous, is insanely jealous, and her cockatiel, Vlad the Impaler, has suddenly started spouting a mixture of psycho-babble, Auden, and the King James Bible. Ingenious and entertaining, this debut from one of the most innovative writers of his generation brilliantly explores the paradoxes of language, storytelling, and reality.
Aristotle the Denier of Actual (and Proponent of Potential) Infinity is a staple of popular books on the topic of infinity.2 Sometimes he ... 3; D. F. Wallace, Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (New York, 2003), 62–8.
Author: Victor Caston
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780192602732
Category: Philosophy
Page: 288
View: 286
Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy is a volume of original articles on all aspects of ancient philosophy. The articles may be of substantial length, and include critical notices of major books. OSAP is now published twice yearly, in both hardback and paperback. "'Have you seen the latest OSAP?' is what scholars of ancient philosophy say to each other when they meet in corridors or on coffee breaks. Whether you work on Plato or Aristotle, on Presocratics or sophists, on Stoics, Epicureans, or Sceptics, on Roman philosophers or Greek Neoplatonists, you are liable to find OSAP articles now dominant in the bibliography of much serious published work in your particular subject: not safe to miss." - Malcolm Schofield, Cambridge University "OSAP was founded to provide a place for long pieces on major issues in ancient philosophy. In the years since, it has fulfilled this role with great success, over and over again publishing groundbreaking papers on what seemed to be familiar topics and others surveying new ground to break. It represents brilliantly the vigour—and the increasingly broad scope—of scholarship in ancient philosophy, and shows us all how the subject should flourish." - M.M. McCabe, King's College London
A.W. Moore. does not receive much mention in Chapter 16, his influence throughout that chapter will be readily discernible to ... 2003); David Foster Wallace, Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (New York, Norton & Co., ...
Author: A.W. Moore
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781351381260
Category: Philosophy
Page: 308
View: 807
We are all captivated and puzzled by the infinite, in its many varied guises; by the endlessness of space and time; by the thought that between any two points in space, however close, there is always another; by the fact that numbers go on forever; and by the idea of an all-knowing, all-powerful God. In this acclaimed introduction to the infinite, A. W. Moore takes us on a journey back to early Greek thought about the infinite, from its inception to Aristotle. He then examines medieval and early modern conceptions of the infinite, including a brief history of the calculus, before turning to Kant and post-Kantian ideas. He also gives an account of Cantor’s remarkable discovery that some infinities are bigger than others. In the second part of the book, Moore develops his own views, drawing on technical advances in the mathematics of the infinite, including the celebrated theorems of Skolem and Gödel, and deriving inspiration from Wittgenstein. He concludes this part with a discussion of death and human finitude. For this third edition Moore has added a new part, ‘Infinity superseded’, which contains two new chapters refining his own ideas through a re-examination of the ideas of Spinoza, Hegel, and Nietzsche. This new part is heavily influenced by the work of Deleuze. Also new for the third edition are: a technical appendix on still unresolved questions about different infinite sizes; an expanded glossary; and updated references and further reading. The Infinite, Third Edition is ideal reading for anyone interested in an engaging and historically informed account of this fascinating topic, whether from a philosophical point of view, a mathematical point of view, or a religious point of view.
20 Two and a half decades after “waking up” to logic, Wallace admitted when writing Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (2003), that “the ontology and grammar of abstractions have always struck me as one of the most ...
Author: Robert Chodat
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780190682163
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 336
View: 976
In a world of matter, how can we express what matters? When the explanations of the natural sciences become powerfully precise and authoritative, what is the status of our highest words, the languages that articulate our norms and orient our lives? The Matter of High Words examines a constellation of American writers who in the decades since World War II have posed these questions in distinctive ways. Walker Percy, Marilynne Robinson, Ralph Ellison, Stanley Cavell, and David Foster Wallace are all self-consciously post-WWII authors, attuned to the fragmentation and skepticism that have defined so much of the literary and critical culture of the last century and more. Yet they also attempt to reach back to older forms of thought and writing that are often thought to have dried up-the traditions of prophecy, of wisdom literature, of the sage. Working within this dual inheritance, these authors are drawn equally to both art and argument, "showing" and "telling," shifting continually between narrative and discursive genres. In their essays they act as moralists, promoting the broad, abstract concepts that might inspire action in the face of naturalistic reduction: community, family, courage, fraternity, marriage, friendship, temperance, judgment. In their narratives, they offer particular lives in particular settings, thick descriptions that give flesh to such high words. Rarely do these movements between genres generate a tidy equilibrium; where their essays speak of cooperation and redemption, their narratives display alienation, loss, and failure. But in pursuing such risky, unorthodox strategies, these postwar sages are not only able to challenge some of the dominant naturalistic theories of the last several decades: cognitive science, neo-Darwinian theory, social science, the fact-value divide in analytic philosophy. Through five chapters of detailed analysis and close reading, Chodat explores the question of whether vocabularies of ought and ought-not can still emerge today, and how these concepts might be embodied, and whether such ideas might be found in things.
Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, W.W. Norton, New York 2004. Chapter 3: Historical views of infinity John Bowin. Aristotelian infinity, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 32 (2007) 233–50. Kevin Davey.
Author: Ian Stewart
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198755234
Category: Mathematics
Page: 144
View: 676
Infinity is an intriguing topic, with connections to religion, philosophy, metaphysics, logic, and physics as well as mathematics. Its history goes back to ancient times, with especially important contributions from Euclid, Aristotle, Eudoxus, and Archimedes. The infinitely large (infinite) isintimately related to the infinitely small (infinitesimal). Cosmologists consider sweeping questions about whether space and time are infinite. Philosophers and mathematicians ranging from Zeno to Russell have posed numerous paradoxes about infinity and infinitesimals. Many vital areas ofmathematics rest upon some version of infinity. The most obvious, and the first context in which major new techniques depended on formulating infinite processes, is calculus. But there are many others, for example Fourier analysis and fractals.In this Very Short Introduction, Ian Stewart discusses infinity in mathematics while also drawing in the various other aspects of infinity and explaining some of the major problems and insights arising from this concept. He argues that working with infinity is not just an abstract, intellectualexercise but that it is instead a concept with important practical everyday applications, and considers how mathematicians use infinity and infinitesimals to answer questions or supply techniques that do not appear to involve the infinite.ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, andenthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
[5] Boyer, Carl Benjamin, History of Mathematics, Second Edition, JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC., NewYork, 1991, 715 pp. [6] Katz, Victor J., A History of Mathematics. An Introduction. ... Everything and More: a compact history of infinity.
Author: Viktor Moroz
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 9781496919892
Category: Philosophy
Page: 114
View: 289
Well known that mathematics and physics have problems in their development. Only one mathematician, Morris Kline, discovered illogicality of development of mathematics. Despite this, he attempted to justify illogicality in math by fruitfulness of usage of mathematics in physics, instead to stay problem about illogical development of physics. Here is discussing inconsistencies of undefined notions which are reasons of paradoxes. Main initial notion of mathematics is notion of infinity, and it has inconsistence and this inconsistency is distributed to derived notions of infinitesimal and continuity. Those notions related to almost all branches of mathematics which used physics. Also in work is considering miss inconsistencies of Euclid’s and non-Euclid’s geometries. A lot approaches like “physics is geometry or geometry is physics” was and is ignoring those inconsistencies of geometries.
David Foster Wallace considers the two-thousand-year quest to understand infinity in Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity; even though it's compact, it's not always easy reading, but it's certainly fascinating.
Author: Nancy Pearl
Publisher: Sasquatch Books
ISBN: 9781570616556
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 304
View: 927
The response to Nancy Pearl’s surprise bestseller Book Lust was astounding: the Seattle librarian even became the model for the now-famous Librarian Action Figure. Readers everywhere welcomed Pearl’s encyclopedic but discerning filter on books worth reading, and her Rule of 50 (give a book 50 pages before deciding whether to continue; but readers over 50 must read the same number of pages as their age) became a standard MO.