Math in the News
Infinite Proofs: The Effects of Mathematics on David Foster Wallace
Kyle McCarthy discusses the mathematics in David Foster Wallace’s writings in an article for The Los Angeles Review of Books.
“To the extent that he was at home anywhere, David Foster Wallace was at home in the world of math,” wrote McCarthy. “As an undergraduate, he studied modal logic; Everything and More, his book on infinity, explained Georg Cantor’s work on set theory to a general audience, and Infinite Jest includes a two-page footnote that uses the Mean Value Theorem to determine the distribution of megatonnage among players in a nuclear fallout game.”
Read the full article.