MATHEMATICAL FICTION:

a list compiled by Alex Kasman (College of Charleston)

Home All New Browse Search About

...
The Last Casino (2004)
Pierre Gill (director) / Steven Westren (screenplay)
...

Contributed by Vijay Fafat

A fairly amateurish movie about a Math professor who is an expert card-counter and ipso facto, banned from most casinos. So he trains 3 math graduates to count cards and work as a team to fleece casinos in Blackjack.

The utility of a simple mapping function which maps all 13 card values on to a card-counting set {-1, 0, +1} is nicely, if all too briefly, explained. There are 2 or 3 very contrived situations which show the 3 students to be math savants (the stereotypical Chinese who memorizes pi, the eastern european girl who talks about 90-degree rotations while serving pizza, etc). Not terribly entertaining.

More information about this work can be found at www.imdb.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 The Last Casino
According to my `secret formula', the following works of mathematical fiction are similar to this one:
  1. Teen Patti by Leena Yadav (Director)
  2. Qui perd gagne! by Laurent Bénégui (Director)
  3. 21 by Robert Luketic (Director)
  4. Silent Cruise by Timothy Taylor
  5. The Case of the Flying Hands by Harry Stephen Keeler / Hazel Goodwin Keeler
  6. Only Say the Word by Niall Williams
  7. San by Lan Samantha Chang
  8. Nachman at the Races by Leonard Michaels
  9. Improbable by Adam Fawer
  10. Gambler's Rose by G.W. Hawkes
Ratings for The Last Casino:
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:
2/5 (2 votes)
..
Literary Quality:
3/5 (2 votes)
..

Categories:
Genre
Motif
TopicProbability/Statistics,
MediumFilms,

Home All New Browse Search About

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)