Of intuition, paradoxes, and incompatible beliefs

I had blogged earlier this week about David Foster Wallace's recent death. Through a post at India Uncut, I learned just now of a compilation of tributes to the author from writers and editors who knew him.

The one that caught my eye (and captured my mind?) is the one by author and Professor of Mathematics at Univ. of Wisconsin, Jordan Ellenberg, which I excerpt here:

Wallace's writing was driven by his struggle with contradictions. He was in love with the technical and analytic; but he saw that the simple dicta of religion and A.A. offered better weapons against drugs, despair, and killing solipsism. He knew it was supposed to be the writer's job to get inside other people's heads; but his chief subject was the predicament of being stuck fast inside one's own. Determined to record and neutralize the mediation of his own preoccupations and prejudices, he knew this determination was itself among those preoccupations, and subject to those prejudices. This is Phil 101 stuff, to be sure; but as any math student knows, the old problems you meet freshman year are some of the deepest you'll ever see. Wallace wrestled with the paradoxes just the way mathematicians do. You believe two things that seem in opposition. And so you go to work—step by step, clearing the brush, cataloging what you find there, separating what you know from what you believe, your intuition sounding at all times the nauseous alarm that somewhere you've made a mistake. And until you find the mistake, there's always a bit of hope—that your intuition is wrong, that your work isn't wasted, that what seems like a paradox really isn't one, that maybe the incompatible beliefs you hold can be satisfied all at once.

Usually it doesn't work out that way.

Indeed!

Apparently, Ellenberg is also an author, having written a novel called The Grasshopper King and a regular column in Slate called "Do The Math", in addition to several articles on mathematical topics for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Wired, Seed, and The Believer.