[andy_xor_andrew]

> Again, Mike Pemulis is lecturing Hal, but this time he is helping Hal prepare for the college board exams. Pemulis states that for the function x^n, the derivative is nx + x^(n-1). In fact, the correct expression is nx^(n-1). This, too, may be a typographical error.

Another possibility is that Pemulis is simply bad at math :D

[crystal_revenge]

What’s interesting about this is that it used to be far more common for most technical people to be pretty well versed in basic calculus. A frightening number of software engineers don’t really understand calculus. But back in the 90s most engineers, even software folks who may likely have come from an EE background, would have had the basics down pretty well. DFW was writing for an audience with a potentially much higher mathematical literacy than today.

The probability that this “mistake” is intentional is related to how likely an informed reader would be to recognize this mistake.

[lacker]

Reading the DFW biography, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, it said that there were hundreds of cases where the editor claimed something was a typographical error, and DFW insisted that actually it was precisely how he meant it to be. They went back and forth for months, with the publisher eventually charging DFW a fee for all the extra labor involved.

So... we can't know for sure, but there's a strong case that any particular little weird error, DFW intended it to be this way. Especially for a "basic calculus" issue like this, for someone who wrote a whole book on the mathematical history of infinity. (Which arguably has its own errors, but those tend to fall more in the category of simplifications for the lay reader, IMO.)

[thaumasiotes]

> there were hundreds of cases where the editor claimed something was a typographical error, and DFW insisted that actually it was precisely how he meant it to be. They went back and forth for months, with the publisher eventually charging DFW a fee for all the extra labor involved.

> So... we can't know for sure, but there's a strong case that any particular little weird error, DFW intended it to be this way.

You'd have to assume that every time he got called out on an obvious error and insisted he'd meant it all along, he was telling the truth.

[gowld]

> (Which arguably has its own errors, but those tend to fall more in the category of simplifications for the lay reader, IMO.)

They were more mis-simplifications by the lay writer.

[spondylosaurus]

I've definitely noticed some of those odd one-off typos, like misspelling the NIKKEI stock exchange as NIKEI, but I had always just assumed some of those were bound to slip through in such a long, dense novel, even with an astute editor :P It sounds like that may not be the case after all...

[griffzhowl]

Yeah, that looks to me far more likely to be deliberate. The obvious comedy of the situation is someone taking himself to be well-versed enough to be giving a lecture while in fact being an incompetent buffoon.