Everything and More

I've started a few posts talking about how long some item has been on my backlog, but this is truly the lengthiest mainstay on my backlog- David Foster Wallace's Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, a book I received as a gift commemorating my four years on the Westford Academy Math Team. This means I got this book in April or May of 2004, nearly nine years ago, and for some reason I just never touched it. I don't recall ever even making an attempt to read this, and I'm not sure why. Given the fact that I was on my high school math team, I'm not really one to get bored by a book about math. The further along I got with college calculus courses, the more I loved it; so you'd think I would have taken some time to crack open this book that starts with Zeno's Paradox (you can never get anywhere because you always have to get halfway first) and ends with Fourier series and Riemann sums- stuff that I found legitimately interesting when I was learning about them at Syracuse. Yet now, years later Everything and More did nothing for me. Why is this? I don't blame the mathematics. I put the blame of David Foster Wallace. The directionless meandering of Infinite Jest (just realized both of his books have 'Infinite' in their title) just didn't work at all in a book about how mass confusion over the concept of the infinite and infinitessimal led to the creation of calculus yet still plagues us today. It was all over the place and rather than being based in proofs, DFW was more interested in the people who made them, and personally I just don't care. This won't sour me much on David Foster Wallace, though, as it seems to be his most criticized book anyway. I've got one more of his (The Pale King) left currently in my backlog, so we'll see if that one inspires me to read any more from him.