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 Infinity (symbol: ) is a concept describing something without any bound or larger than any natural number. Philosophers have speculated about the nature of the infinite, for example Zeno of Elea, who proposed many paradoxes involving infinity, and Eudoxus of Cnidus, who used the idea of infinitely small quantities in his method of exhaustion. Modern mathematics uses the general concept of infinity in the solution of many practical and theoretical problems, such as in calculus and set theory, and the idea is also used in physics and the other sciences. In mathematics, "infinity" is often treated as a number