In this 'Very Short Introduction', Ian Stewart discusses infinity in mathematics while also drawing in the various other aspects of infinity and explaining some of the major problems and insights arising from this concept. He argues that working with infinity is not just an abstract, intellectual exercise but that it is instead a concept with important practical everyday applications, and considers how mathematicians use infinity and infinitesimals...

David Foster Wallace brings his intellectual ambition and bravura style to the story of how mathematicians have struggled to understand the infinite, from the ancient Greeks to the nineteenth-century mathematical genius Georg Cantor's counterintuitive discovery that there is more than one kind of infinity.

"Speculation is rife that by 2012 the elusive Higgs boson will be found at the Large Hadron Collider. If found, the Higgs boson would help explain why everything has mass. But there's more at stake-what we're really testing is our capacity to make the universe reasonable. Our best understanding of physics is predicated on something known as quantum field theory. Unfortunately, in its raw form, it doesn't make sense-its outputs are physically impossible...

After the sight of a night sky filled with stars makes eight-year-old Uma feel very small, she asks people how they think about infinity and gets a variety of answers before realizing the comfort in knowing that some things go on forever.

"X and Y are desperate to bake infinite pie! With the help of quirky and uber-smart Aunt Z, X and Y will use math concepts to bake their way to success!"--

A mathematician and scientist in residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago helps readers explore the concept of infinity through unique concepts including chessboards, a chicken-sandwich sandwich and the creation of infinite cookies from an infinite dough ball.