Talk:Everything and More (book)

NPOV Rewrite

I took the liberty of rewriting this article because the original seemed a little glib and offhanded, like it had been pulled from a Salon.com review. It also failed to mention that the book was about Georg Cantor. I still haven't added much in the way of info, and my prose could use a good edit, so if anyone wants to help, please do. Thanks. --Staple 08:59, 28 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hey according to Amazon reviews, people didn't have issues with the math but had issues with the style. Right? --M a s 23:10, 10 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Well the math is pretty hard too. I suspect that the only people who bothered to read it were either math-types or geeky white-boy book nerds (ala yours truly), for whom the math would be less of a problem. Unless you've had some college calculus you're not going to be able to follow the proofs. Its written with the standard DFW discursiveness--which means that its a difficult-to-follow account of a difficult-to-follow subject.Staple 18:37, 6 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Critical Rucker Reveiw

I'm a bit busy at the moment, but here's a link to the pdf of Rucker's critical review. The most substantial mathematical error he explicitly identifies is a passage in which Wallace mistakenly suggests that the Continuum Hypothesis is the hypothesis that the cardinality of the power set of aleph null is equal to the cardinality of the real numbers (c), when in fact it is the hypothesis that nothing comes between aleph-zero and c -- i.e. that aleph one = beth one.

It seems pretty clear to me that this is probably a careless error that, while it could have been detected by a bit of peer review, is not of huge significance. Nonetheless, one can understand Rucker's assertion that Wallace's style makes such errors hard to take, and that he ought to have "projected self-deprecating humor." I see Wallace's style as growing precisely out of his own particular brand of self-deprecating humor, but I can see how it might not come across that way to everyone.

A pdf of the article is here: http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/wallace_review.pdf

A link to it is here: http://www.rudyrucker.com/writing/

Solemnavalanche (talk) 05:48, 7 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Page Title

Everything and More does not seem to actually be an essay, but rather a full length 302 page book. Should we change the article title to reflect that? something more like 'Everything and More (book)' or 'Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity'. --Mtgaffney56 14:34, 20 July 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mtgaffney56 (talk • contribs)