Books: To infinity and beyond: reading writing on arithmetic

It's a pretty good bet that David Foster Wallace got good grades in English and math when he was in school.

Wallace's contribution to the "Great Discoveries" pop-science series is at times barely comprehensible to anyone without Wallace's understanding of higher math; at other times it reads like nonsense to anyone without Wallace's intimidating vocabulary and tolerance for idiosyncratic style. When his new work, Everything and More: A Compact History of ?, walks the line between impenetrable linguistic flourishes and prolix descriptions of abstract graduate-level math, we discover Wallace at his most esoteric--and beyond the reach of most readers.

In the book, Wallace renders the history of math beautifully, giving equal measure to the personal pettiness and intellectual virtuosity of men like Kepler, Pythagoras and Newton. His style bleeds through even into the mathematical example, most notably when he uses a ruler and the height of his youngest niece to exemplify the existence of infinitesimals.

The crux of the book is Wallace's description of nineteenth century mathematician/crackpot Georg Cantor's discovery of increasingly larger infinities. Sadly, it's a disappointing climax that avoids descriptions of the people and times, choosing rather to stick to the mathematics. Wallace's scholarly way makes the book more useful for the egg-headed; Everything and More will read like gibberish to most.

Wallace is a writer whose non-literary passions--tennis and higher math--frequently influence his writing. This is quite evident in his masterpiece, Infinite Jest, where integrals and forehands combine to give an insight into the American mindset. Everything and More obscures Wallace's talent for words behind a talent for numbers, and when the talent leaks out, it does so sparingly. Imagine a VCR manual by Nabokov, or a Zagat's review by Pynchon. Wallace is still among the greatest minds of our time, but fans of his novels hope to see more characterization and less calculus next time.