{"id":2985,"date":"2008-09-28T17:43:30","date_gmt":"2008-09-28T17:43:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/09\/28\/letter-books-or-the-benefits-o\/"},"modified":"2008-09-28T17:43:30","modified_gmt":"2008-09-28T17:43:30","slug":"letter-books-or-the-benefits-o","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/09\/28\/letter-books-or-the-benefits-o\/","title":{"rendered":"Letter Books, or the Benefits of a Digressive Writing Style"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m currently reading David Foster Wallace’s Everything and More: A Brief History of ∞<\/cite>, 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

[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<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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… Continue reading Letter Books, or the Benefits of a Digressive Writing Style<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-math","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2985\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}