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The Circumference of the World (2023) |
 | Lavie Tidhar |
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This genre-bending meta-fictional novel concerns a mysterious book called "Lode Stars" by a pulp science fiction author who founded a religion. The main tenets of that religion are that the universe is... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-04-24 13:27:43 |
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The MANIAC (2023) |
 | Benjamin Labatut |
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The life of John von Neumann is the main focus of this book which (like the author's other work in this database) could easily be mistaken for a non-fictional history book. The middle portion of the book... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-04-10 11:42:27 |
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Exordia (2024) |
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| Seth Dickson |
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Seth Dickinson's Exordia (Jan 2024) takes as one of its central conceits the notion that the physical universe is an expression of mathematical reality, and has as one of its central characters a Chinese... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-04-09 11:48:05 |
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The Triangular House [La Casa Triangular] (1925) |
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| Ramon Gomez de la Serna |
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Adolfo Sureda had made a lasting promise to himself: to have a house of unique architecture built for him and his bride, Remedios.
For this, he commissioned a recent graduate of architecture who... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-04-03 13:01:23 |
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Kayip Piramit - Sayilarin Izinde (2019) |
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| Ahmet Baki Yerli |
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History of science professor Tahir Baturay has been trying for years to unravel the secrets of the Egyptian pyramids. However, despite all his attempts, he could not make any significant progress. On... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-04-02 14:51:00 |
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Küplerin Savasi (2021) |
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| Ahmet Baki Yerli |
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This Turkish novel for young adults appears to be a fictionalized account of the dispute between Tartaglia and Cardano over the solution to cubic equations. A nice account of the true story can be found here in Quanta Magazine, but I'm afraid I do not know anything more about Yerli's book which so far has only been published in Turkish. (more)
Last Changed: 2024-04-02 14:40:08 |
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Principles of Emotion (2024) |
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| Sara Read |
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Meg Brightwood grew up as a mathematical prodigy with an overbearing mathematician father and an absent mother. She later quit her academic job due to a combination of her crippling anxiety and the sexism... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-04-02 13:24:05 |
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Babbage (2008) |
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| Claire Barker (writer-director) / Eamon Wyse (writer) |
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A 2010 movie sponsored by the British Council and directed by Claire Barker. It is a short, 15-minute vignette, a dramatization of a fictional dinner conversation between Charles Babbage, his religious... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-04-02 12:20:19 |
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The Engineer of Moonlight (1979) |
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| Don DeLillo |
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The aging mathematician Eric Lighter spends time with his assistant (James), wife (Maya), and ex-wife (Diana) who are all staying together at his home in this two act play.
Diana is shocked to learn... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-03-27 12:29:43 |
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The Wonderful Dog Suit (1964) |
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| Donald Hall |
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I have to say this very short story (published in The Carleton’s Miscellany in Spring 1964) merges magic realism and horror quite effortlessly with child-like humor so that by the end of it, you are... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-03-21 16:06:41 |
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Three Plates on the Table [Tres platos en la mesa] (1961) |
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| José María Gironella |
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An emotional, sensitively written example of a short story of magic realism, in the classic tradition of Borges and Cortazar. Most of the story revolves around the main character’s frame of existence,... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-03-18 12:45:05 |
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The Cubist and the Madman (1991) |
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| Robert Metzger |
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This is one whacked-out ride of a story, very well written for its purpose, completely disorienting in its mood and descriptions, and achieving its purpose the way a cubist painting would. Rather than... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-03-14 20:04:24 |
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Diabologic (1955) |
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| Eric Frank Russell |
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Tagline: “One way to keep a man from getting anywhere is to give him a toy—a nonsense puzzle —that he can’t put down. It’s much more effective than trying to forcibly hold him!”
This is... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-03-12 22:09:12 |
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The Shadow of the God (1900) |
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| Charles Newman Hall |
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A cute, poetically-written story set in the Yucatan, where Ethel, her cousin, Tom, and Tom’s college friend, Whitman, went looking at the ruins of an ancient Aztec “Temple of Huitzilopochtli”.
Whitman... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-03-12 21:44:42 |
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On the Average (1953) |
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| Frank Bryning |
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Tagline: Critics of Dr. Rhine’s famed ESP experiments have eyed the Law of Averages with skepticism. In space those critics may triumph.
A story which highlights the fact that while statistics have... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-03-11 22:09:22 |
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Probability Murder (2006) |
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| Michael Flynn |
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This amusing, if a bit farcical, little tale unfolds in a bar on a very rainy night, where Sam Hourani, a homicide detective, recounts to the storyteller how he thinks that a recent “accident”... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-03-09 11:23:32 |
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Nobody Loves a Moebius Strip (1979) |
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| Alice Laurance |
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A very warm and fuzzy 2-page story about a living alien creature shaped in the form of a Mobius Strip. It starts off with:
“You could be interested,, even fascinated by one, you could conceivably... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-03-09 11:18:01 |
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The Young Philosopher - A Sketch For Parents (1852) |
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| Sylvanus Cobb, Jr.. |
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Another short story which highlights the prejudices the society had toward the measure of “intelligence” and the inability to recognize the large range of human abilities at a young age, where the... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-03-08 08:16:23 |
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Balthazar and I (2021) |
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| Massar (Writer and Director) |
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I recently created a short post for this movie based only on this description that I found on IMDB:
The main character is a lonely modern man addicted to sex. He can not understand women and is obsessed... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-03-01 12:57:20 |
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Cobra (2022) |
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| R. Ajay Gnanamuthu (Director) / Kannan (Screenplay) / Sekar Neelan (Screenplay) |
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This picaresque Indian film focuses on a powerful crime lord named Cobra who also happens to be a mathematical genius known as "Mathi". It is ambitious in its three-hour length and its attempt to combine... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-03-01 12:46:14 |
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Le Théorème de Marguerite [Marguerite's Theorem] (2023) |
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| Anna Novion (Writer and Director) |
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Marguerite Hoffman is a mathematics PhD student at the prestigious École normale supérieure in Paris, but drops out after an error is found in her proof of the Riemann Hypothesis. Her math skills allow... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-03-01 12:26:27 |
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Dimensional Analysis and Mr Fortescue (1965) |
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| Eric St. Clair |
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A fairly silly story typical of pulp magazines. Mr. Fortescue wanted to to build a funhouse (“House of Fun, Magic, and Mystery”) in his town. Why? Read with an eye-roll:
“This town needed... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-02-29 22:28:32 |
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Bees (1848) |
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| Anonymous |
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A simple one-page story written to convey the standard “Argument from Design” championed by William Paley, by articulating how the intricate hives constructed by bees follow mathematical principles,... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-02-28 17:03:02 |
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Rapunzel's Etymology of Zero (2016) |
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| Katie May (Writer) / Seth Podowitz (Director) |
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[This] is a cute concept film which uses the fairy tale setting of Princess Rapunzel to articulate some simple but attractive mathematical concepts. In particular, it has a funny take on a desperate... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-02-27 13:56:48 |
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The Shape of Things (1948) |
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| Ray Bradbury |
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Neither Peter Horn nor his wife ever expected that their child would be a small blue pyramid of another dimension!
The story is a very poignant vignette of a pregnant woman, Polly, who, through... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-02-24 22:15:30 |
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Fruits of Perseverance (1841) |
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| Anonymous |
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This short story does not have a specific plot which threads in mathematical ideas. It is much more a “Math Sermon”, deployed by a caring mother to instill a value system in her young child.... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-02-24 22:10:42 |
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Pascal's Wager (2001) |
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| Nancy Rue |
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A math graduate student working in K-theory meets a young philosophy professor who challenges her atheistic beliefs with Blaise Pascal's famous "wager". Mathematics takes a back seat to theology in this... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-02-14 22:34:37 |
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The Love Formula (2023) |
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| Giulia Clerici/Giulia Pasqualini |
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this Italian graphic novel contains three different tales of romance. Each one is written to resemble a different geometric relationship between lines and curves: being parallel, being asymptotic, and... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-02-13 21:06:16 |
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Hypatia's Math: A Play (2016) |
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| Daniel S. Helman |
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This play about the life of the ancient Greek mathematician Hypatia features music, dance, and the ghost of Hypatia herself. It was first performed in 2016 at the Flagstaff Arts & Leadership Academy in... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-02-10 21:23:47 |
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Crash Course in Romance (2023) |
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| Je Won Yu (director) / Hee-Seung Yang (writer) |
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A grocery store owner and a "celebrity" math teacher fall in love in this South Korean TV series. Each episode’s title is mathematical, and we get to see Choi Chi-yeol being treated like a rock star... (more)
Last Changed: 2024-01-08 19:05:46 |
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