Nerve gas, Weapon of chemical warfare that affects the transmission of nerve impulses through the nervous system.
According to Ryan Compton's Infinite Jest by the Numbers, Wallace used a vocabulary of 20,584 unique words to write the 577,608-word Infinite Jest. 10. 11. n+1 has a neat story about where the name for Michael Pemulis, Hal's drug-dealing friend at Enfield Tennis Academy, came from.
Contributed by Anonymous. The main math element in Infinite Jest is the Eschaton chapter/endnote. In particular, these contain a statement of the Mean Value Theorem with a few accompanying basic-calculus type diagrams, and then some gibberish about computing integrals from only the extrema of the function in question.