david foster wallace

             One of the many human problems that DFW has beaten over our heads this semester has been the basic issue of communication. We are each alone in our own heads, and language, as an abstraction, only exacerbates this problem by making a complete and flawless communication of our thoughts and feelings next to impossible. In his Everything And More, DFW attempts to communicate the problem of infinity to the non-mathematical mind, and while some of us might find the read kind of enjoyable-ish, the book is filled with technical flaws for the mathematical mind to pick out and get upset about.
                      “Trying to express numerical quantities and relations in natural language- to translate mathematical propositions into English and vice versa- often causes trouble” (34). After he says this, DFW goes into a word problem in which 3 men split a 30 dollar hotel room, receive a 5 dollar refund, each take a dollar of the refund and give the remaining 2 dollars to the bellboy. Simply on the basis of the wording of the problem, a dollar disappears: each man paid 9 dollars (3×9=27) and the bellboy received 2 dollars, which adds up to a transaction totaling 29 dollars. In reality, a dollar did not disappear, as a different framing of the problem accounts for the extra dollar. The issue of the missing dollar is simply a product of a faulty communication of the problem. I think this example can help to explain why there are so many mathematical errors in the book. In attempting to use one abstraction (language) to communicate another (math) to those without mathematical backgrounds, DFW lost much of the math’s meaning.
                      Math is, as DFW never ceases to point out, a multi-layered abstraction that is difficult for some of us to understand, and nearly impossible for a lot of us to relate to the real world. To those who are not mathematically gifted, it is much easier to read well-written books about the surface of mathematical concepts than to gain a deep and fully functional understanding of the concepts. It is these people for whom Wallace wrote Everything And More, and it is these people more than mathematicians who find the book enjoyable and maybe enlightening. Thus, DFW had to dumb down the concepts to a readable level, taking out unnecessary mathematical language and equations and, in consequence, filling the book with errors, both of omission and otherwise. The errors were not intentional, nor were they a result of any lack of mathematical understanding on DFW’s part: the errors were simply a product of the same language difficulties DFW discusses in much of his fiction work.