Discovering Infinity Reading List

Books

Eli Maor, To Infinity and Beyond: A Cultural History of the Infinite

Amir Aczel, The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity

Tom Stoppard, Jumpers

Short Stories:

                Nancy Casey, "Welcome to the Hotel Infinity"

            A. J. Deutsch, "A Subway Named Mšbius"

            William Hazlitt Upson, "A. Botts and the Mšbius Strip" and "Paul Bunyan versus the Conveyor Belt"

        Stanislaw Lem, "The Extraordinary Hotel, or the Thousand and First Journey of Ion the Quiet."

           Philip Dick, "The Indefatigable Frog"

            Jorge Luis Borges,  "The Ethnographer," "The Aleph," "The Library of Babel," "Death and the Compass," and "The Garden of Forking Paths"

Essays:

        Naum Yakovlevich Vilenkin, "Some Extraordinary Properties of Infinite Sets"

        M. C. Escher, "Approaches to Infinity"

        Jorge Luis Borges, "The Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise," "Avatars of the Tortoise," "A Defense of the Kabbalah," and Review of Kasner and Newman.

            E. T. Bell, "Paradise Lost?" from Men of Mathematics

            Brendan Kneale, "God and Mathematical Infinity"

            Moses de Leon. excerpt from the Zohar

Song Lyrics:

        Epoch of  Unlight. "Continuum Hypothesis," "Cardinality," and "Ad Infinitum"

Mathematics Text:

            Michael Olinick, Discovering Infinity: Some Mathematical Notes for FYSE 1176