MATHEMATICAL FICTION:

a list compiled by Alex Kasman (College of Charleston)

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Blasphemy (2008)
Douglas Preston
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Contributed by Vijay Fafat

Douglas Preston's novel, “Blasphemy”, contains a few mathematical references that come up when scientists encounter “God” at the (hypothetical) world's largest particle collider, SSC II. Chaitin's Omega number appears along with “e”, as does Knuth's up-arrow notation (in specifying an ultra-large number dubbed “God's First Number”). The universe is described by “God” as an irreducible computation whose output would require a complete computation lasting God's-First-Number years. There are a couple of nice paragraphs, where “God” says: “You give me a hand with 5 fingers, not the integer 5. Your number system has no independent existence in the real world. It is nothing more than a sophisticated metaphor” and “[you are] like a monkey who has figured out how to count to three. You find four pebbles and think you have discovered infinity”.

Contributed by Anonymous

The logics and axiom of mathematics are incredibly important to this story.

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 Blasphemy
According to my `secret formula', the following works of mathematical fiction are similar to this one:
  1. The Last Answer by Isaac Asimov
  2. Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer
  3. Saint Joan of New York: A Novel About God and String Theory by Mark Alpert
  4. Pieces of Pi by David Bartell
  5. Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
  6. Axiom of Dreams by Arula Ratnakar
  7. The Visiting Professor by Robert Littell
  8. Light by M. John Harrison
  9. 3-adica by Greg Egan
  10. Eversion by Alastair Reynolds
Ratings for Blasphemy:
RatingsHave you seen/read this work of mathematical fiction? Then click here to enter your own votes on its mathematical content and literary quality or send me comments to post on this Webpage.
Mathematical Content:
4/5 (1 votes)
..
Literary Quality:
5/5 (1 votes)
.

Categories:
GenreScience Fiction,
MotifReligion,
TopicReal 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)