Is infinity a valid mathematical property or a meaningless abstraction? David Foster Wallace brings his intellectual ambition and characteristic bravura style to the story of how mathematicians have struggled to understand the infinite, from the ancient Greeks to the nineteenth-century mathematical genius Georg Cantor's counterintuitive discovery that there was more than one kind of infinity. Smart, challenging, and thoroughly rewarding, Wallace's tour de force brings immediate and high-profile recognition to the bizarre and fascinating world of higher mathematics.

A retitled and revised edition of Ian Stewart's The Problem of Mathematics, this is the perfect guide to today's mathematics. Read about the latest discoveries, including Andrew Wile's amazing proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, the newest advances in knot theory, the Four Colour Theorem, Chaos Theory, and fake four-dimensial spaces. See how simple concepts from probability theory shed light on the National Lottery and tell you how to maximize your winnings. Discover how infinitesimals become respectable, why there are different kinds of infinity, and how to square the circle with the mathematical equivalent of a pair of scissors.