Goddammit he's so fucking dumb it's unreal. I knew more math than him when I was in the 8th grade.
>CH can be characterized as.... 'Do the real numbers constitute to the power set of the rational numbers'
That's not CH you dumbass. It's a theorem in ZF that |R|=2^N = 2^(Aleph_0)
>'Is c the same as 2^Aleph_0'
Yes it is, and that's not what CH says lmao.
>'Does c=Aleph_1'
Glad he finally got it! The fact that he doesn't know what CH states or the fact that he thinks these statements are all equivalent. God he's so retarded, it's unbelievable.
What are some essential books on mathematics?
Jason King
Jeremiah Murphy
>The fact that he doesn't know what CH states or the fact that he thinks these statements are all equivalent.
Meant to say
>I don't know what's worse: the fact that he doesn't know what CH states or the fact that he thinks these statements are all equivalent.
Jonathan Rivera
Oh the irony...
This book is comedic gold.
Jace Davis
Come again, Mr. David Foster Wallace? You're not only not making any sense in math, you're not making any sense in... English, which was supposed to be the thing that you're good at. Why are you writing this book again?
Luis Ross
Also Axiom of Choice as well as its equivalent forms mentioned in the footnote 99 are extremely elementary and not hard to understand at all (unless you're as smart as DFW). They're not at all the "high-eros concepts" that DFW tries to make them out to be.
Kevin Long
Ok, so how do we go about this, mr. David Foster Wallace?
Also
>booklet
At least you got that right.
Henry Price
If you're getting this much enjoyment out of this garbage, you need to read IJ. It's such a flagrant offense to literature, it's one of the most entertaining things to read. That motherfucker had zero intelligent ideas in his entire life.
James Jenkins
trying too hard mate
Logan Gonzalez
Start with the Greeks work just as well for Math as it doea for Philosophy
Josiah Smith
loving the posts. the story behind this book is that he was approached by norton to write a poppy intellectual biography of cantor for their series on "great discoveries," but dfw was determined to prove himself capable of writing "serious" academic work on math and shunned their advice to write something fun and accessible. of course, once dfw started researching, he found he was in over his head and had to constantly revise earlier passages where he thought he knew what he was doing but in fact was completely wrong. in the end he was able to cobble together a work that looked plausible to anyone with no knowledge of math, and was a disgusting mess for anyone even somewhat versed in set theory. norton had some inkling of how bad the book was, but it was already delayed and the amount of revisions would have required a complete rewrite, so they just said fuck it and published it. on name recognition alone the book outsold all the others in the series, and even though there have been several damning takedowns on it from seasoned mathematicians, norton makes enough money on it that they don't care.
dfw was a smart guy, but his best trick was knowing exactly what to say to make himself look smart. unfortunately, any time he encountered someone with actual knowledge on something, he quickly looked foolish (e.g. look up linguists' responses to his article on prescriptivism or read his abysmal interpretations on wittgenstein). the best way to read Everything and More is as a portrait of existential crisis. a man whose mathematical knowledge was limited to only what was sufficient to impress others without any mathematical knowledge undertakes a work to prove his ability, only to confront endlessly his own inadequacy, producing a work spilling forth with footnotes like "don't ask" in a desperate hope to throw the reader off from realizing the fraudulent nature of the work.