They are purposeful, I don't think Pemulis ever gets one thing right in the novel. His explanation of Annular Fusion is a good example, unless you also want to make the case that Wallace got the made up science wrong as well. Pemulis grew up in a place where he was generally the smartest person around and was able to bluff his way through life without much effort. Then he got a scholarship to somewhere with actual expectations and standards but Pemulis kept on with his lazy ways. Pemulis is probably smart but his laziness and arrogance keep him from ever achieving his own intelligence, he is forever lobbing but is a bit too slow to get to the net in time.

Vast majority of character's are well explained and the answers are all in the novel, just need to look at their childhood and upbringing.

No one of any level of math skill would mistake the the derivative of x^n as nx + x^n-1. There's no way DFW messed that up, but it's also a pretty bizarre mistake to have a character make if they're supposed to be making mistakes.

In terms of 'meeting the reader where they are,' you would want to telegraph the math mistakes pretty hard, or they would fly past everyone. Making them obvious and dumb is the only way they'll get attributed to the character, rather than the author.

Ah yes, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, a famously “meet the reader where they are” book

Eschaton was just slop for the masses!

Perhaps my favorite deliberate error in arithmetic is from Winston Groom's Forrest Gump, during the protagonist's tour in Vietnam:

> I am the machine gun ammo bearer, cause they figger I can carry a lot of shit on account of my size. Before we lef, a couple of other fellers axed if I would mind carryin some of their han grenades so’s they could carry more orations, an I agreed. It didn’t hurt me none. Also, Sergeant Kranz made me carry a ten-gallon water can that weighed about fifty pounds.

Unlike Forrest, the reader knows a gallon of water weighs roughly eight pounds and is not spared the extent of his burden.

Eighty pounds is "about fifty pounds", especially considering that a water can worth carrying at all is often not full, and insofar as nothing else in the paragraph is given a specific weight so the precise number doesn't really matter.

> Unlike Forrest, the reader knows a gallon of water weighs roughly eight pounds

Maybe at the time. Presumably that gets an explanatory footnote in modern editions?

Would Pemulis be Polonius though? If he were the advisor to the king, then the king would more likely be Tavis, not Hal.

I do like the idea of Mario as a court jester though.

I associated Pemulis with Polonius based on the phonemic similarity of the names. I don't have the maths background to evaluate the mistakes, but agree that if intentional they "match" with the character's presentation in Hamlet.

Maybe a phonetic similarity with "pretentious" as well

Good point. Although the book isn't any sort of adaptation, so I could see including an allusion to the Polonius character even in a slightly different role.

(I'd also forgotten about the janitors, who are clearly a reference to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern)

Wouldn't Pemulis' mathematical errors be consistent with how Infinite Jest begins? I.e., he has some sort of degenerative condition directly or indirectly associated with exposure to strange mold found in the basement of his childhood home?

It's Hal who ate the mold and who's blasted at the "beginning" of Infinite Jest

Thanks for correcting me on that. It's been years since I read this great book.

And the title

Maybe DFW wasn't as smart as he thought he was.