Dubious Math in Infinite Jest (2009)

They are purposeful, I don't think Pemulis ever gets one thing right in the novel. His explanation of Annular Fusion is a good example, unless you also want to make the case that Wallace got the made up science wrong as well. Pemulis grew up in a place where he was generally the smartest person around and was able to bluff his way through life without much effort. Then he got a scholarship to somewhere with actual expectations and standards but Pemulis kept on with his lazy ways. Pemulis is probably smart but his laziness and arrogance keep him from ever achieving his own intelligence, he is forever lobbing but is a bit too slow to get to the net in time.

Vast majority of character's are well explained and the answers are all in the novel, just need to look at their childhood and upbringing.

No one of any level of math skill would mistake the the derivative of x^n as nx + x^n-1. There's no way DFW messed that up, but it's also a pretty bizarre mistake to have a character make if they're supposed to be making mistakes.

Perhaps my favorite deliberate error in arithmetic is from Winston Groom's Forrest Gump, during the protagonist's tour in Vietnam:

> I am the machine gun ammo bearer, cause they figger I can carry a lot of shit on account of my size. Before we lef, a couple of other fellers axed if I would mind carryin some of their han grenades so’s they could carry more orations, an I agreed. It didn’t hurt me none. Also, Sergeant Kranz made me carry a ten-gallon water can that weighed about fifty pounds.

Unlike Forrest, the reader knows a gallon of water weighs roughly eight pounds and is not spared the extent of his burden.

Would Pemulis be Polonius though? If he were the advisor to the king, then the king would more likely be Tavis, not Hal.

I do like the idea of Mario as a court jester though.

Wouldn't Pemulis' mathematical errors be consistent with how Infinite Jest begins? I.e., he has some sort of degenerative condition directly or indirectly associated with exposure to strange mold found in the basement of his childhood home?

And the title

Maybe DFW wasn't as smart as he thought he was.

Personally I don't agree with that review at all, and I loved Everything and More. I'm even somewhat of a "finitist" myself mathematically, but I think you can just view the whole hierarchy of infinities as a finite mode of description, and get utility from it without worrying about the "reality" of the whole thing. But that's a bit of an aside.

The review-writer clearly hates the book before he even gets to the mathematics. The whole book is striking a middle ground between expressing every step of mathematical rigor, and describing in a more literary way how to feel about these concepts. All of these "errors" are just the author passing over a point in less detail than you would want from a text on set theory. I thought it was great, and for anyone who enjoys both set theory and Infinite Jest, I would strongly recommend the book.

I understand that some people don't like it, but it should be viewed as "controversial" rather than "everyone agrees that it's riddled with errors".

Yeah, I like DFW (although mainly from essays and interviews) and thought this book was not good. Tangentially, I didn’t really like Rucker’s book on infinity either. I can’t remember why exactly, but it didn’t match up with other math popularizers (eg, Strogatz, Nahin).

About half way through the book he tries to do an epsilon delta proof and completely gets the logic wrong. Ignoring any philosophical outlook, this is not a great math book.

The problem with Everything and More is not because it is "uncritical"; it's that DFW didn't understand it and was "not even wrong" when explaining it. Even if you choose not to engage with Cantor's hierarchy of infinities because you don't find it interesting or relevant to the (finite or smaller infinite) sets you care about, there's nothing wrong with it as mathematics.

> Maybe it's "just" another sign they're in an alternate universe where even the math is different

Unlike physics, there are no conceivable alternate universes with different math. That's what's so cool about math: it could not possibly be any different. There could be alternate universes where they've discovered different amounts of it, or named the discoveries different things, but everything that is "wrong" in math in our universe is universally (multiversally?) wrong.

What’s interesting about this is that it used to be far more common for most technical people to be pretty well versed in basic calculus. A frightening number of software engineers don’t really understand calculus. But back in the 90s most engineers, even software folks who may likely have come from an EE background, would have had the basics down pretty well. DFW was writing for an audience with a potentially much higher mathematical literacy than today.

The probability that this “mistake” is intentional is related to how likely an informed reader would be to recognize this mistake.

Reading the DFW biography, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, it said that there were hundreds of cases where the editor claimed something was a typographical error, and DFW insisted that actually it was precisely how he meant it to be. They went back and forth for months, with the publisher eventually charging DFW a fee for all the extra labor involved.

So... we can't know for sure, but there's a strong case that any particular little weird error, DFW intended it to be this way. Especially for a "basic calculus" issue like this, for someone who wrote a whole book on the mathematical history of infinity. (Which arguably has its own errors, but those tend to fall more in the category of simplifications for the lay reader, IMO.)

Yeah, that looks to me far more likely to be deliberate. The obvious comedy of the situation is someone taking himself to be well-versed enough to be giving a lecture while in fact being an incompetent buffoon.

Agreed. It was really a revelation to me. Looking back now, it's clear that I started reading it as a status seeking thing. I thought my intellectual friends (and especially girlfriends) would think it was cool that I actually read the whole thing (which nobody else in our circle had actually managed yet). But then it turned out to really affect me deeply.

I read it again about a decade later after all those games were over for me, just for myself, and loved it even more that time.

For some people, it just really does hit a nerve!

Have you read "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon? If not, it's worth checking out.

Yes, once you read IJ, it is very hard to find another book like it. It is almost as if IJ refers to itself.

House of Leaves, perhaps?

What race is Hal?

I enjoyed Infinite Jest.

I think it's good book if you are someone who HAS to know all the details.

The book itself criticizes this way of thinking, while letting you in the all the details you could want. (the footnotes especially)

I get the sense that the writing style is a metaphor and part of it for sure.

I also really like many of the subtle ideas the book presents.

Though like many "post modern novels", it's not for everyone. If intentionally dull parts are not your thing, that's perfectly fine IMO.

I had a very easy/boring job and where during last few month I spent most of my time reading infinite jest after finishing the days work. I really loved it but I probably won't read it again anytime soon, there's a pretty substantial upfront time investment you have to make before it starts getting enjoyable to read.

Though once you lock in with the world and flow of infinite jest it gets pretty amazing, I wish I had more people to talk to about it without coming off as a pretentious jackass. Also it's far more enjoyable to read it as an ebook where you can jump instantly from the text to footnotes and look up unfamiliar words. Reading the physical copy seems torturous to me.

Yeah definitely, multiple times. But I feel you! The first time I read it it took me months to make it past the first couple hundred pages. But once you get far enough in everything starts to gel and it gets really fun.

At about page 300 it starts to pay off hard and you fly through the rest. I definitely recommend giving it another go.

Yes I have and I think I'm the only person not lying about that fact.

I totally agree, IJ might be the single most disappointing book I've read given the extreme hype around it. The writing style felt very self-indulgent and annoying. The funny/clever parts rarely seemed amusing to me.

Enough people say they love the book that it's probably just a style thing that didn't click for me, but I regret how much time I spent slogging through the book and never bothered to finish it.

Cool. We care. Keep talking.

Interesting! But then it seems like he would have said it a bit differently, that the odds of that particular tournament with those specific players ending in a tie were much lower.

You’re right. I’ve just changed the title of the article adding “(un)” to the beginning. I can’t prove the errors are intentional, but given the author’s reputation it would surprise me if they weren’t.

Yes, the title entered here on HN is misleading and misrepresents the actual article.