| | The New Yorker: The Critics: Books (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-18) |
 | | Others, however, dismissed Cantor’s infinity of infinities as a “fog on a fog” and “mathematical insanity.” Cantor felt persecuted by these critics, which worsened his nervous condition (he seems to have suffered from a bipolar disorder). |
 | | Still, Wallace’s enthusiasm for the theory of infinity is evident on every page (not least in his conviction that Cantor is “the most important mathematician of the nineteenth century,” a view that few mathematicians or intellectual historians would agree with). |
 | | The thrill we get from discovering that some infinities are bigger than others, Wittgenstein thought, is just a “schoolboy pleasure.” There is nothing awesome about the theory; it does not describe a world of timeless, transcendent, scarcely conceivable entities—it is really no more than a collection of (finite) tricks of reasoning. |
| www.newyorker.com /critics/books/?031103crbo_books (2375 words) |