“But Wallace didn’t just talk about math. He structured his work with it. In a 1996 Bookworm interview with Michael Silverblatt, Wallace explained that he modeled Infinite Jest after a Sierpinski Gasket, a type of fractal in which a triangle is infinitely subdivided into smaller triangles using the midpoint of its borders. Pressed by Silverblatt on why he chose such a formation, Wallace elaborated: “Its chaos is more on the surface; its bones are its beauty.”

– Kyle McCarthy, in “Infinite Proofs: The Effects of Mathematics on David Foster Wallace,” which appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books on November 25th, 2012