Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity

David Foster Wallace's Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity is a survey of the mathematical concept of infinity. The work explores how mathematicians, starting with Georg Cantor in the 19th century, discovered that there isn't just one type of infinity, but many. Cantor proved that sets like natural numbers, integers, and rational numbers are all the same size (countable infinity), but that the set of real numbers is a larger infinity. The book likely delves into the historical understanding of infinity, from the ancient Greeks' aversion to "actual" infinity to the development of calculus and the paradoxes of infinite sets. It also touches upon the unresolved continuum hypothesis, which questions the existence of infinities between the countable and the continuum.123