Footfalls above "we would see the tracing on the stage floor of a tremendously elongated variation of the figures 8 turned on its side … the mathematical symbol for infinity." Beckett was also indebted to the French psychologist Pierre Janet for his conception of hysterical behaviour. In his overview of Janet's work, Robert Woodworth in his "Contemporary Schools of Psychology", a work Beckett read, pays particular attention to Janet's description of the "hysterical paralysis of one arm", which Beckett incorporated, into May's posture. There are a number of analogies between "Footfalls" and Janet's work with a patient called Irène: He lists
Vanish at infinity Vanish at infinity In mathematics, a function on a normed vector space is said to vanish at infinity if For example, the function defined on the real line vanishes at infinity. More generally, a function formula_4 on a locally compact space (which may not have a norm) vanishes at infinity if, given any positive number formula_5, there is a compact subset formula_6 such that whenever the point formula_8 lies outside of formula_6. In other words, for each positive number formula_5 the set formula_11 is compact. For a given locally compact space formula_12, the set of such functions (where formula_14 is