Infinity: Novelist's Math, Physicist's Drama

March 7 -- Numbers and narratives, statistics and stories. From Rudy Rucker's Spaceland to Apostolos Doxiadis' Uncle Petros and the Goldbach Conjecture, from plays such as Copenhagen, Proof, and Arcadia to many non-standard mathematical expositions, the evidence is building.

There has always been some interplay between mathematics and literature, but the border areas between them appear to be growing. Increasingly, fiction seems to come with a mathematical flavor, mathematical exposition with a narrative verve.

Two recent works on the mathematical notion of infinity illustrate this phenomenon. One is by novelist David Foster Wallace, the author of the exuberant 1,088-page novel Infinite Jest, among other works of fiction. His new book Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity sketches the history of humanity's attempts to understand infinity. It begins with the Greeks and ends with modern logicians, Georg Cantor in particular. In between are accounts of the attempts by many mathematicians to get a handle on the discombobulating notions of the infinitely big and the infinitesimally small.

The other work on the topic is a play entitled Infinities by English physicist and cosmologist John Barrow. So far performed only in Europe, the play dramatically explores various counterintuitive aspects of infinity, from a scenario devoted to Jose Luis Borges' parable of the Library of Babel to one about the implications of mathematician David Hilbert's Hotel Infinity.

To get a feel for the latter, imagine a scenario in which you arrive at a hotel, hot, sweaty and impatient. Your mood is not improved when the clerk tells you that they have no record of your reservation and that the hotel is full. "There is nothing I can do, I'm afraid," he intones officiously.