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Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity
Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity | David Foster Wallace
4 posts | 2 reading | 6 to read
"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.
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anokokona
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Eggs Welcome to Litsy 🤗👏🏻 5y
2 likes1 comment
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anokokona

The attributes ‘equal‘, ‘greater‘, and ‘less‘ are not applicable to infinite, but only to finite quantities.

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anokokona

In algebra the mind is first taught to consider general truths, truths which are not asserted to hold only of this or that particular thing, but of any one of a whole group of things. It is in the power of understanding and discovering such truths that the mastery of the intellect over the whole world of things actual and possible resides; and ability to deal with the general as such is one of the gifts that a mathematical education should bestow

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brianharley
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That our thoughts and feelings are really just chemical transfers in 2.8 pounds of electrified pâté.