[HN Gopher] Infinite Proofs: The Effects of Mathematics on David...
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Infinite Proofs: The Effects of Mathematics on David Foster Wallace
(2012)
Author : lordleft
Score : 95 points
Date : 2024-08-09 16:55 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (lareviewofbooks.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (lareviewofbooks.org)
| lordleft wrote:
| Here is the book on Infinity DFW penned:
| https://www.amazon.com/Everything-More-Compact-History-Infin...
| jawjay wrote:
| Such a great book. Do you know if he there is any other DFW
| math-ish writings to be found? All my searches thus far have
| turned up naught.
| markgall wrote:
| I'm not aware of any, but maybe somebody else is. A more
| general question is are there any other DFW-ish math-ish
| writings to be found? Against The Day (Pynchon) is not really
| math-ish, but it does have a good bit of math (more than GR
| at least), and a DFW fan would probably like it. Stella Maris
| (McCarthy) is perhaps neither DFW-ish nor math-ish, but it is
| Serious Fiction centered on a mathematician and is probably
| the best work of fiction to feature Alexander Grothendieck. I
| have heard that Solenoid (Cartarescu) has some math in it,
| though I fear it's still sitting on my shelf. Every Arc Bends
| Its Radian (due in a couple months from Sergio De La Pava)
| has a math-ish title but I doubt it will actually contain
| much math.
|
| Michael Harris -- a mathematician who wrote a review of the
| DFW Infinity book -- has a book called "Mathematics Without
| Apologies", which I liked, though it's non-fiction. There is
| also "Birth of a Theorem" by Fields medalist Cedric Villani
| which is an interesting read -- not fiction, but it is
| experimental in many respects and I would say worth a read.
| krelian wrote:
| You'll probably enjoy When We Cease to Understand the World
| by Benjamin Labatut.
| markgall wrote:
| Oh, good idea! I read The Maniac but not that one, and
| the former should be on my list too.
| jawjay wrote:
| Awesome recommendation, I enjoyed that one very much!
| lukas099 wrote:
| Endnote 123 in Infinite Jest
| JonathanMerklin wrote:
| I want to note for the HN crowd that the book is in the "just
| technical enough to inform yet not scare off the layman, but
| not technical enough for the practitioner" nonfiction subgenre.
| Critically, there are a number of finer details that DFW gets
| wrong; if you're mathematically inclined and intend to read
| this, I suggest pairing it with a printed copy of Prabhakar
| Ragde's errata document hosted by the DFW fansite The Howling
| Fantods ([1]).
|
| [1] https://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw/images/enmerrata.pdf
| citizen_friend wrote:
| This. He tries to do a few epsilon delta proofs and
| completely gets the concept wrong. I'm surprised an editor
| did not stop this.
|
| If he can't understand a limit it really puts a question mark
| on whether it's worth reading his insight into the subject.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Why would his editor know any more about it than he did?
| citizen_friend wrote:
| I would expect them to have someone with at least an
| undergrad in math look over the math. Editor would help
| identify that
| kylebenzle wrote:
| Maybe everyone that worked with DFW found him to be as
| insufferable and arrogant as I did and simply refused to
| help even when the need was clear.
| markgall wrote:
| This should be read in parallel with the review by Michael
| Harris in the AMS Notices: "A Sometimes Funny Book Supposedly
| about Infinity" https://www.ams.org/notices/200406/rev-
| harris.pdf
|
| As a DFW lover whose day job is as a mathematician... that
| book's a clunker.
| vundercind wrote:
| I feel less-bad about not having finished it now.
|
| I was doing fine until formulas started showing up more than
| very-occasionally. I'm basically dyslexic when equations
| enter the picture.
| will-burner wrote:
| Michael Harris is a great mathematician (number theory, let's
| go!!), but that review to me is pretty rambling and doesn't
| point out many inaccuracies in DFW's book, but takes issue
| with DFW's approach and style or writing. I did just skim the
| review and am a DFW fanboy, but Harris seems to have issues
| with books about infinity and math for lay people, which is
| fine, that's driving his opinions here.
|
| I'd imagine there will also be a gap between what
| mathematician's think of novelists writing and what novelists
| think of real math. So there's that too.
| will-burner wrote:
| I'm surprised by the mathematician's critiques of this book. I
| have a PhD in math and I read this book about 10 years ago now.
| I loved it. I'm sure there are some inaccuracies, but he gets
| the overall story correct. There's enough math in the book to
| be engaging for someone mathematically trained. There's also a
| lot more history than if you read a math book that just has
| proofs. And the book is entertaining in the way that DFW's
| books usually are. As a former mathematician I highly
| recommend.
| lacker wrote:
| I agree. The inaccuracies listed are like, once every few
| pages the author makes a statement like "P implies Q" without
| mentioning some minor condition, like, "only if you assume
| the axiom of choice". Yes, this is annoying for
| mathematicians, but there's just a fundamental compromise
| that has to be made. If you spell out every single detail
| then you will create a book that is not engaging enough to
| read straight through.
|
| I think you will really enjoy this book if, like me, you:
|
| 1. Enjoy David Foster Wallace's literary style
|
| 2. Have a good mathematical understanding of set theory
|
| Unfortunately, the intersection of these two conditions might
| make for a very small target audience!
| nathan_compton wrote:
| The axiom of choice isn't exactly some minor condition.
| ballooney wrote:
| That's why you don't have to explicitly add it as a
| qualifier at every instance in which it's implied in your
| work of non fiction for a general audience.
| otteromkram wrote:
| Love DFW's Kenyon College commencement speech, but he wasn't all
| sunshine and rainbows[0]:
|
| > In the early 1990s, Wallace was in a relationship with writer
| Mary Karr. She later described Wallace as obsessive about her and
| said the relationship was volatile, with Wallace once throwing a
| coffee table at her as well as physically forcing her out of a
| car, leaving her to walk home. Years later, she claimed that
| Wallace's biographer D. T. Max underreported Wallace's abuse. Of
| Max's account of their relationship, she tweeted: "That's about
| 2% of what happened." She said that Wallace kicked her, climbed
| up the side of her house at night, and followed her five-year-old
| son home from school.
|
| Reference: [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace#Abuse_all...
| np_tedious wrote:
| There is another big reason not to call him "sunshine and
| rainbows"
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| I loved the movie "The end of the tour"
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3416744/
|
| Would like to read but I dont know math.
|
| I am also too addicted. I have had a book on my shelf for 2 years
| unread.
|
| I listen to 1h of audio book and I love it and then I stop and
| loose the plot.
|
| oh well.
| pastrami_panda wrote:
| Small suggestion from a DFW fan, read the extremely brief book
| This Is Water, and then try to take on Infinite Jest - just
| make sure to read the foreword by Dave Eggers before you start,
| it will light a guiding torch for the journey and what to
| expect coming out of it.
| motohagiography wrote:
| while I haven't read DFW, it was because I was suspicious of his
| motives even in the 90s. the article leads with how he studied
| "modal logic," as an undergrad, which I only know of as a tool
| from a theorist named Kripke to reason about systems of logic
| that don't need external consistency or to produce arithmetic. it
| was taught in cultural studies programs as a justifying
| rhetorical "what-aboutism" for neutralizing appeals to logic, a
| kind of critical theory of math to unmoor people from the
| authority of math or anything objective, and to guide them to
| adopting subjectivity. What made me suspicious of DFW was he
| seemed to be doing just another variation of what L. Ron Hubbard,
| Richard Wagner, Karl Marx, Osho, Nietzche, and other attempted
| inventors of religions were up to, and Kripke's modal logics are
| a tool for producing these logics-of-ideas, a way of writing new
| pop-ideologies the way we write songs. DFW seemed like a hipster
| demagogue to me.
|
| another artist whose work may be more rigorous in representing
| ideas from math is Arvo Part. even though there are more concrete
| things in his work than DFWs that you can logically decode,
| derive, and then transform and expand on them, much of what I've
| read[1] is still a bunch of woo that uses talking about "math" as
| a kind of mystical jibjab to elevate other ideas. Part worked as
| a sound and radio engineer and there is some reason to believe he
| used that practical knowledge in composing, because the logic in
| the music is very explicit. (visible triangles and linear
| functions, he has provided sketches of, etc)
|
| there's a difference between writing something that is a metaphor
| for a mathematical idea as a vehicle for something else, and
| something that directly _encodes_ the idea where you could derive
| it again from the thing you 've produced. Maybe DFW did that with
| the Sierpinksi gasket, but I don't get the sense from anyone that
| he did. I am not a mathematician at all, but I do think if the
| idea is not independent of the language or representation it's
| made in, it's just another metaphor and a vehicle for the author.
|
| [1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-
| to-...
| dylanfw wrote:
| What on earth are you talking about Saul Kripke and modal logic
| being some kind of cultural studies tool for "unmooring people
| from the authority of math"? And your lumping of Wagner, Marx,
| and Nietszche with Hubbard and Osho as "inventors of religions"
| is baffling.
| keiferski wrote:
| Modal logic is a pretty rigorous branch of logic.
|
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-modal/
| motohagiography wrote:
| it has applications in developing semantics, and I think it's
| about to get some new attention as a tool for LLMs. it's a
| system for defining consistent systems of rules about
| semantic relationships that you can write in a LISP, and I
| think Kripke's modal logics are about to have a resurgence in
| interest from AI alignment advocates for that reason.
|
| regarding some of the less thoughtful comments on this
| thread, I'm sure those were the best they could do, but the
| original article was way more handwavy, and his appeals to
| the sophistication of math to elevate other ideas seem pretty
| consistent with my suspicions. why should anyone be surprised
| that some people operate on systems of belief as systems the
| way we do with games and software.
| keybored wrote:
| This is an eclectic mixture of proper nouns.
| cypherpunks01 wrote:
| I haven't read the The Pale King, but I absolutely love the
| reading of this excerpt from the book. The protagonist recalls a
| speech by his substitute teacher in the Advanced Tax course -
| https://youtu.be/sJXrXf-0yoQ (10mins. no math). I do hope to
| tackle the book one day.
| pastrami_panda wrote:
| Amazing delivery! Thank you for sharing this, I started The
| Pale King many years ago but got sidetracked - this video
| inspired me greatly to try to finish it again.
| zkldi wrote:
| There's quite a lot of mathematical mistakes (obvious ones, even)
| in DFWs work. I'm not sure whether it's intentional or not, but
| given that he also makes mistakes in his nonfiction it might just
| be that he's not a great mathematician.
|
| Like in TPK, 0/0 is Infinity and in IJ, Pemulis explains
| differentiation completely incorrectly, also that stuff about the
| mean value theorem is irrelevant?!?
|
| Still one of the greatest authors; deep technical correctness is
| more of a Pynchon thing.
| cobbal wrote:
| Given that proofs must be finite (or it's easy to prove
| falsehoods), maybe the title is appropriate then.
| enthdegree wrote:
| Pemulis' absolutely worthless and wrong but also completely
| self-assured descriptions of calculus are part of his character
| lukas099 wrote:
| That's funny, I just got to that part in my rereading of IJ
| and I had no idea it was completely wrong.
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