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
Infinity infinity. The symbol is encoded in Unicode at and in LaTeX as codice_1. It was introduced in 1655 by John Wallis, and, since its introduction, has also been used outside mathematics in modern mysticism and literary symbology. Leibniz, one of the co-inventors of infinitesimal calculus, speculated widely about infinite numbers and their use in mathematics. To Leibniz, both infinitesimals and infinite quantities were ideal entities, not of the same nature as appreciable quantities, but enjoying the same properties in accordance with the Law of Continuity. In real analysis, the symbol formula_1, called "infinity", is used to denote an unbounded limit.