MATHEMATICAL FICTION:

a list compiled by Alex Kasman (College of Charleston)

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Der Rechenmeister [aka The Mathematician] (1999)
Dieter Jörgensen
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Contributed by Bernd Schulze

When I browsed through your list I found one book missing that I have in my library: "Der Rechenmeister" by Dieter Jörgensen is a novel describing the life of Niccolo Tartaglia in Venice and his battle with Girolamo Cardano about the solution of the cubic equation. There is no formula in the text but a good description of what the problem is and how it was solved.

The book appeared 1999 as hardcover, my paperback edition is from 2001 and has ISBN 3-7466-1704-9. A short lookup at amazon shows that there is a a french edition that seems to be still in print ("Le Maitre des nombres", 2859498282), but the english editions (0060185333 or 0060933437 - note that the author is written here as "Jorgensen" and not with an umlaut) seem to be out of print.

Please continue your work with that list - I hope I will find a lot of interesting stuff to read!

More information about this work can be found at www.amazon.com.
(Note: This is just one work of mathematical fiction from the list. To see the entire list or to see more works of mathematical fiction, return to the Homepage.)

Works Similar to Der Rechenmeister [aka The Mathematician]
According to my `secret formula', the following works of mathematical fiction are similar to this one:
  1. The French Mathematician by Tom Petsinis
  2. Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann
  3. The Five Hysterical Girls Theorem by Rinne Groff
  4. When We Cease to Understand the World [Un Verdor Terrible] by Benjamin Labatut
  5. Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy
  6. Hypatia or The Divine Algebra by Mac Wellman
  7. Perelman’s Refusal [Les Refus de Grigori Perelman] by Philippe Zaouati
  8. The Goddess of Small Victories [La déesse des petites victoire] by Yannick Grannec
  9. Doctor Who: The Turing Test by Paul Leonard
  10. Pythagoras the Mathemagician by Karim El Koussa
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Categories:
GenreHistorical Fiction,
MotifReal Mathematicians,
TopicAlgebra/Arithmetic/Number Theory, Real Mathematics,
MediumNovels,

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Exciting News: The 1,600th entry was recently added to this database of mathematical fiction! Also, for those of you interested in non-fictional math books let me (shamelessly) plug the recent release of the second edition of my soliton theory textbook.

(Maintained by Alex Kasman, College of Charleston)