David Foster Wallace is a high-profile American writer, maybe even important. I confess, I’m a Wallace fan, though I’m waiting to see if this relative youngster (somewhere around his fifth decade) maintains the virtuosity and expansiveness of his greatest book so far, Infinite Jest. He certainly has all the markings of a great writer: ambition, intelligence, a sense of gravitas, and, perhaps most notably, style. He has achieved a brand recognition that guarantees him regular appearances in the pages of slick gazettes like The New Yorker and Harper’s. He writes with an earnestness and self-awareness that is almost as compelling as the story he is telling. Whatever the topic, he is simply fun to hear on the page. And every so often he lands a sublime observation with such clarity that it is breathtaking. So when I heard that this talented writer had published a book on mathematics, I felt like the pimply weakling in school who is tapped on the shoulder by the popular senior and asked to sit at his table in the lunchroom while he tells his pals all about how cool I am. I was eager to see my profession through the eyes of a charming admirer. Wallace splits his time between fiction and nonfiction. His first collection of essays A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again appeared shortly after Infinite Jest and helped solidify his status as a literary celebrity. Tennis, popular culture, and science are frequent sources of inspiration. There aren’t many serious writers working today who find something universal in cross-court volleys; neither are there many who use mathematics as artistic media. In one of the first essays in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley”, he describes his edge in competitive junior tennis: “‘Unless you’re one of those rare mutant virtuosos of raw force, you’ll find that competitive tennis, like money pool, requires geometric thinking, the ability to calculate not merely your own angles but the angles of response to your angles. Because the expansion of response-possibilities is quadratic, you are required to think n shots ahead, where n is a hyperbolic function limited by the sinh of the opponent’s talent and the cosh of the number of shots in the rally so far (roughly).” This passage (which, incidentally, gets a more refined treatment in Infinite Jest as James Incandenza’s philosophy of tennis) gives a hint about Wallace’s technique. As a writer, he is not a mutant virtuoso of raw force, and, indeed, he does calculate a kind of triangulation between his reader, his editor, and his subject matter. But he ably scores points with his readers, whatever the artifice. While there is an element of high jinks that runs throughout Wallace’s work, he is deeply concerned about the fate of humanity and, in particular, humanity in thrall to the miracles of technology, some of which he uses to keep his readers enthralled. In many ways, Wallace was a natural choice to kick off a new series by Atlas Books and Norton & Co. celebrating for a popular audience some of the great achievements of science and mathematics. Technical details figure prominently in his essays and fiction and he has repeatedly professed an affection for mathematics. In that respect E&M is a curious love letter to the discipline, one that I suspect he has long wanted to write. There is a math legend, occasionally reinforced by fact, of the PhD student who writes a lengthy body of theory built upon assumptions that are satisfied only on the empty set. One senior colleague remarked that most of the obvious mistakes occur at the very beginning. While Wallace’s mistakes are numerous, easily spotted, and by now well documented, the beginning of E&M is pretty much right on the money. It’s difficult to say, though, exactly where the book begins. The editor seems to think that it begins on page 1, which Wallace calls a “Small But Necessary Foreword.” This chapterette is indeed in the best tradition of forewords: Wallace addresses his readers directly in an informal tone and muses about the challenges of writing about mathematics in a way that is interesting and relevant to non-mathematicians. The rest of the book, however, continues in this voice, addressing his editor and the reader directly, frequently drawing attention not only to the fact that you are reading, but he is writing a book about mathematics
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Oct 1, 2011
Gary W Elko 
Open Access