I’m currently reading David Foster Wallace’s Everything and More: A Brief History of ∞, because his recent death made me want to read some of his stuff, and I haven’t read this (which turns up on best-science-books lists) before, so it seemed like a good way to go. Reading Wallace does tend to affect my writing in a manner not necessarily to the advantage of my prose style, particularly at a time when I’m awaiting manuscript comments from my editor, whose email telling me that the comments were coming included strict instructions to break up my more complex sentences, so this may not be the best of plans.
But anyway. The book is, as the title suggests, a history of attempts in mathematics to deal with the infinite, and it’s pretty much everything you would expect from Wallace writing about math– laden with shorthand, heavily footnoted, literate, funny, and extremely carefully laid out in such a way as to suggest it was being written all in a rush with no revision or proofreading. It also includes a large number of digressions, including this bit from a discussion of the personal history of Georg Cantor:
[T]he major portions of Cantor’s literary estate were evidently lost or nurned. Most of what’s left is at the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen ad is available for perusal behind glass. Family letters, genealogies, etc. There are also still a few of Cantor’s letter-books, which were what literate people then used to draft letters before copying them carefully out to send. Plus there were other mathematicians he wrote to who kept his letters. These are the primary sources.
He just answered, in passing, something that’s always sort of bugged me, namely, how is it that there are so many quotes from famous people based on things they wrote in letters they sent to other people, sometimes before they were famous. It’s always seemed a little odd that the recipients would be all that scrupulous about keeping copies, and that those copies would end up in places where historians and biographers could easily locate them. If the general practice was for people to write drafts of letters out before sending them, and keep the books containing those drafts, though, that would make a whole lot more sense.
Assuming, of course, that Wallace is right about this, and not just boldly asserting that some peculiarity of Cantor’s was a general practice. I’m sure somebody out there knows more about historical practice than I do, and can either confirm or deny this.
I’m sure someone at Union knows this… Ask on Tuesday….
I enjoy Wallace’s shorter pieces; he was a brilliant writer, but I never finished Infinite Jest. It isn’t really a novel and really needed some editing. One of those Life’s Too Short novels…
I read that book a few years ago and quite enjoyed it, but I was a little disappointed that (if I recall correctly) it stopped not long after the explanation of the existence of uncountable sets. I had only just learned about Cantor’s set theory before reading the book, and I was hoping that it would go more in depth about the interesting mathematics that has been done since then, and the many new aspects of infinite sets that have been discovered.
That’s always bugged me as well! Now I know.
2: Hmmph. Life is not too short for good books. Long or otherwise.
I suspect you’ll find that keeping letter-books was like keeping your receipts; your basic nineteenth century audit-trail. Handwritten letters is how *all* business was conducted.
Chad, you should have at least one historian on tap at a liberal arts college!
Letter books or draft letters were indeed a common practice up till the beginning of the 20th century. You must keep in mind that up till the 18th century there were no academic journals so private lectures filled this function with multiple copies oft being written and sent to several recipients who in their turn copied the letters and sent them on to further recipients. Due to this practice originals and answers were often kept together in one folder forming a collection similar to an article in a journal plus the responses in the letters column. The largest problem is when the entire papers of an academic are disposed of by a relative, who considered them worthless. Some academics such as Christoph Trew an 18th century doctor and natural historian bought up the letters of his dead colleague in order to reserve them for posterity. Even with the widespread habit of drafts and fine copies it is still very much a matter of hit and miss as to what has survived.
A good example of what can happen is the papers of George Boole. His widow, Mary Everest Boole, carefully conserved and sorted all of his papers after his death, in 1864. At the end of the century she passed them on to Bertrand Russell with the request that he should edit and publish them. Russell said that he was not qualified for the work and passed them on to his student Phillip Jourdain who was both a logician and a logic historian. Unfortunately Jourdain died young in 1919 and the Boole papers wandered to A E Heath who published a selection of the probability papers but ignored the rest. In the 1940s Heath died and his widow burnt all of the papers on a bonfire in the garden because they were cluttering up the house.