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Three Plates on the Table [Tres platos en la mesa] (1961) |
| 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) |
| 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) |
| 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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It's Raining Frogs (1950) |
| Milton Lesser |
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This is another silly story about the fourth dimension, how those who have access to it can teleport completely confined objects in three dimensions out of their confinement to another location without... (more) Last Changed: 2024-03-12 22:00:45 |
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The Shadow of the God (1900) |
| 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) |
| 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) |
| 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) |
| 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) |
| 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) |
| 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) |
| 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) |
| 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) |
| 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) |
| 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) |
| 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) |
| 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) |
| 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) |
| 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) |
| 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) |
| 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) |
| 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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Fermat's Cuisine [Fermat no Ryori] (2018) |
| Yugo Kobayashi |
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This four-volume manga series (also recently adapted as a melodramatic Japanese television series) follows a student named Gaku who has given up on his dream to become a world-famous mathematician and... (more) Last Changed: 2024-01-02 12:24:19 |
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The Book of Alephs (2023) |
| Inderjeet Mani |
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A writer becomes infatuated with the author of a book he is given by a bookseller. The bookseller says it is the ideal book for him personally since he is not like other people. He notices right away... (more) Last Changed: 2023-12-13 11:29:54 |
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Babirusa (2022) |
| Arula Ratnakar |
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One can briefly summarize this story without mentioning anything about mathematics: It concerns ethically questionable experiments conducted by a company called REMedy that link people through a “dream... (more) Last Changed: 2023-12-09 22:49:41 |
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Axiom of Dreams (2023) |
| Arula Ratnakar |
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An aspiring mathematician gets a brain implant designed to aid her research on Gödel Incompleteness in the hopes that it will help her get accepted into a PhD program. But, against the advice of... (more) Last Changed: 2023-12-06 22:56:06 |
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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) |
| James Mangold / Jez Butterworth/John-Henry Butterworth/David Koepp |
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I finally saw this final installment of the Indiana Jones movies and was surprised that there was a mathematical aspect to it. In hindsight, I realize that the reason I did not hear about it is that it... (more) Last Changed: 2023-12-03 19:33:00 |
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Hamlet and Pfister Forms - A Tragedy in Four Acts (1992) |
| Jan Minac |
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An absurd combination of comedy, advanced mathematics, and Shakespearean tragedy by Western University math professor Ján Mináč which was performed at the mathematical institute in Oberwolfach,... (more) Last Changed: 2023-11-14 19:10:35 |
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Symposium (1974) |
| R.A. Lafferty |
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This story consists of a philosophical discussion between characters with names like "Wye" and "Zed". A good bit of it is about mathematics and its foundations. For example:
"And, Zed," said O doubtfully,... (more) Last Changed: 2023-09-28 22:01:28 |
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Eve Times Four (1960) |
| Poul Anderson |
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An old "pulp" SF story about an accident which strands some space travelers on a deserted but habitable planet. One of them is a female mathematician:
Teresina was of the tall and willowy persuasion,... (more) Last Changed: 2023-09-27 18:04:06 |
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