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Infinite Proofs: The Effects of Mathematics on David Foster Wallace (2012)

To the extent that he was at home anywhere, David Foster Wallace was at home in the world of math. On commonalities between language, fiction, and math.

As an undergraduate, he studied modal logic; Everything and More, his book on infinity, explained Georg Cantor’s work on set theory to a general audience, and Infinite Jest includes a two-page footnote that uses the Mean Value Theorem to determine the distribution of megatonnage among players in a nuclear fallout game. Now, many people agree that Infinite Jest is a singular novel, sui generis, akin perhaps only to Moby-Dick in its originality, but the qualities that earn the book that praise — its grotesque hyperrealism, exuberant asides, and melding of academese and slang, its spikes and spurts of kindness and abjection — seem to have nothing to do with Wallace’s experimental use of fractals. Doxiadis diagrams and close-reads several panegyrics and murder trial transcripts from Ancient Greece, demonstrating that the speeches are indeed structured as ring compositions, and argues that their use persisted across genres as their efficacy in persuasion, as well as inherent beauty, was discovered and exploited.

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