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Dubious Math in Infinite Jest (2009)

The Howling Fantods - David Foster Wallace News and Resources Since March 97

Let me say, first of all, that I am a huge fan of David Foster Wallace in general and Infinite Jest in particular.On my first reading of IJ, I noticed a few mathematical errors but thought little of them.After reading the essay Derivative Sport in Torndao Alley in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, though, I became curious about why a writer with a clear aptitude for math would include such mistakes in his opus.Therefore, during my second reading of IJ, I made a note of the errors that I noticed.As it turned out, their number was smaller than I had imagined.Consequently, I lost interest in this topic until reading DFW's review of a pair of mathematical novels in a scientific journal.The broad knowledge of math demonstrated by DFW in this article rekindled my curiousity about the errors in IJ, and I decided to document them, in case others might be interested.My list is actually quite short - only fourmistakes, two of which might well be typographical - and I offer no theories about why they appear.One of the errors is attributable to the omniscientnarrator, while the other three are spokenby Mike Pemulis.Both, we can assume, are competent mathematicians. The denominator in this expression is easy to calculate.It is simply 2^108 (an example will follow).The numerator can be found using the concept of combinations.That is, the correct anwer is the total number of ways team A can be assigned exactly 54 victories out of the 108 matches. Clearly, there are six outcomes resulting in a 2-2 tie (AABB, ABAB, ABBA, BAAB, BABA, and BBAA), so the odds are, indeed, 6/16 as the method above predicts.

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