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Antonia's Line (1995) |
 | Marleen Gorris |
|
About three or more generations of
strong and self-sufficient women who live on a farm and the people
around them. Antonia's granddaughter is a genius, namely a
mathematician and a musician. But she... (more) |
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The Arnold Proof (2002) |
 | Jessica Francis Kane |
|
This short story begins with a quote from Philip E.B. Jourdain's essay "The Nature of Mathematics". In the quote, he explains how in the process of carrying out a complicated computation, one may want... (more) |
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The Axiom of Choice (2009) |
|
| David Corbett |
|
An extremely well-crafted short story in which math professor coldly recounts for a detective how the bloody bodies of his wife and his student came to be in his house. It is not really a murder mystery,... (more) |
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A Beautiful Mind (2001) |
|
| Sylvia Nasar / Akiva Goldsman |
|
Although the book A Beautiful Mind: A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr. is not fictional, Ron Howard's film (released December 2001) most certainly is. (I say this not as a complaint, but just to justify... (more) |
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The Bird with the Broken Wing (1930) |
|
| Agatha Christie |
|
The Harley Quin stories (this collection, plus two later stories) are amongst the most peculiar mysteries ever written. (They certainly are Dame Agatha's most peculiar. They were also her personal... (more) |
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The Birds (BC414) |
|
| Aristophanes |
|
In one scene of this classic Greek play, the geometer Meton appears
and...well, it's pretty short. So why should I summarize it when I can
simply reproduce it here!
(Enter
METON, With surveying... (more) |
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Brain Dead (1990) |
|
| Charles Beaumont (writer) /
Adam Simon (director) |
|
A nightmarish, reality bending horror movie about a brain surgeon whose services are obtained to retrieve corporate secrets from the mind of a mathematician who has become a homicidal maniac.
(more) |
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Cantor's War (1974) |
|
| Christopher Anvil |
|
In my opinion, this story is slanderous and the author should be ashamed.
The plot involves a science fiction scenario in which the human military is battling aliens in "tau space". Whenever we send... (more) |
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Cryptology (2003) |
|
| Leonard Michaels |
|
You know how The New Yorker likes to publish vaguely bizarre short
stories that happen to take place in New York City? You know how lots of
authors who want to show a character who is afraid of "real... (more) |
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Do the Math: A Novel of the Inevitable (2008) |
|
| Philip Persinger |
|
A math graduate student becomes an intern for a math professor famous for his `theory of inevitability' but ends up also helping his wife (an even more famous author of romance novels) write a book using... (more) |
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Doctor Who: The Algebra of Ice (2004) |
|
| Lloyd Rose (pseudonym of Sarah Tonyn) |
|
Lloyd Rose (pen name for Sarah Tonyn) has a “Doctor Who” book called “The Algebra of Ice”. It describes the attempted invasion of our universe by mathematical beings from another dimension. These... (more) |
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Falling Umbrella (2002) |
|
| Julia Whitty |
|
In this short story, an aging mathematician witnesses a woman with an umbrella jumping (falling?) off of the Golden Gate bridge. Mathematical terminology is tossed around reasonably well ("proofs by contradiction",... (more) |
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Family Ties (Episode: My Tutor) (1985) |
|
| Jace Richdale (Screenplay) / Sam Weisman (Director) |
|
I'm writing to bring your attention to a television episode for
possible addition to your mathematical fiction website. The television
show is "Family Ties" and the episode is entitled, "My Tutor".... (more) |
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The Five Hysterical Girls Theorem (2000) |
|
| Rinne Groff |
|
I think this play about a number theory conference at the British seaside at the turn of the 20th century may be misunderstood. The plot revolves around the neuroses of the senior researcher, Moses Vazsonyi,... (more) |
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FYI (1961) |
|
| James Blish |
|
This story contains a brief explanation of the transfinite cardinals
and their arithmetic as part of a scary bit of science fiction. Why,
you may ask (and the character in the story does), do the transfinite
cardinals... (more) |
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The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009) |
|
| Stieg Larsson |
|
In this sequel to the stunningly popular The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the self-taught, nearly autistic, young genius, Lisbeth Salander, once again becomes involved in a thrilling mystery allied with... (more) |
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The Gold Cup (2000) |
|
| Lucas Reiner |
|
A character study of the patrons in a Los Angeles coffee shop, including Jack, a mathematician. Jack is widowed, anti-social, and spends his time trying to "penetrate zero". (more) |
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Gulliver's Travels (1726) |
|
| Jonathan Swift |
|
If you are lucky enough to find an unabridged version of
Swift's classic book, you will be able to read (among descriptions of
the people of many other unbelievable countries) about the people of
Laputa.... (more) |
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Heavy Weather (1994) |
|
| Bruce Sterling |
|
Tornado weather in Texas gets worse over the coming decades, and a team
headed by a supergenius mathematician confronts the ultimate tornado.
Includes explicit summaries of his mathematical prowess (surprisingly,
not chaos theory) and of his complete social incompetence (not a surprise,
I suppose).
(more) |
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Hole in the Paper Sky (2008) |
|
| Howard Kingkade (Screenplay) / Bill Purple (Director) |
|
An anti-social mathematics graduate student is forced to take a job in his university's psychology department where he gets to know a dog used for laboratory experiments. In risking all to save the dog,... (more) |
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The Hollow Man (1993) |
|
| Dan Simmons |
|
A psychic mathematician is driven to the edge of insanity as his life partner approaches death. The mathematician's research is described explicitly -- as are some of the horrific events that befall... (more) |
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The Indian Clerk (2007) |
|
| David Leavitt |
|
Acclaimed author, Leavitt, presents a fictionalized version of one of the most famous "human interest stories" in mathematical history: the short life and career of Srinivasa Ramanujan. Focusing largely... (more) |
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The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells (Episode: The Truth about Pyecraft) (2001) |
|
| Chris Harrald (Script) / Clive Exton (Script) / Herbert George Wells (story) |
|
Please correct me if I'm mistaken here, but it seems that the 2001 TV miniseries The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells took the story ``The Truth about Pyecraft'', which has no math in it, and made the main... (more) |
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The Integral: A Horror Story (2009) |
|
| Colin Adams |
|
This story, which he claims is an attempt to emulate Stephen King, is different from many of Adams' others. This may explain why it was published for the first time in his 2009 collections Riot at the... (more) |
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An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) |
|
| Aimee Bender |
|
Mona Gray is a second grade math teacher for whom math is not only a
job, but a beloved friend, an obsession and a security blanket. In this first novel we
learn about the events that have shaped her and her creative teaching
methods.
Quirky and fun. Unique and intriguing writing style. Loved it.
(more) |
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Journey into a Dark Heart (1998) |
|
| Peter Hoeg |
|
This story appears in the collection Tales of the Night made up of stories by Hoeg that are all set on the evening of March 19, 1929. In this one, a depressed young Danish mathematician takes a train... (more) |
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Killing Time (2000) |
|
| Frank Tallis |
|
In this noir thriller, a British math grad student discovers antique lab equipment which allows him to see into the past and winds up murdering his girlfriend. Sex (explicitly described) and interpersonal... (more) |
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The Last Enemy (2008) |
|
| Peter Berry (Screenplay) / Iain B. MacDonald (Director) |
|
BBC TV series featuring an anti-social mathematician showing signs of obsessive compulsive disorder who discovers and takes down an evil government plot in the dystopian near future. I have not yet... (more) |
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Leaning Towards Infinity (1996) |
|
| Sue Woolfe |
|
Tells the story of an Australian woman who wins a contest for the best
mathematical theory from an amateur mathematician. The prize is a trip to
a math conference in Athens. The theory proposed by... (more) |
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Long Division (2003) |
|
| Michael Redhill |
|
The title of this short story refers both to arithmetic, a beloved subject of the school age child at its center, and the separation that his mother feels from him and his father due to the child's extraordinary... (more) |
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A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (2006) |
|
| Janna Levin
|
|
This novel about Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel contains much that has already been said many times before, and occasionally "tries too hard" artistically. Still I very much enjoyed reading it, and even... (more) |
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Mailman (2000) |
|
| J. Robert Lennon |
|
The title character, called Mailman, is a mentally ill mailman
with criminal and deviant behavior with respect to the mail that
he handles. It turns out that Mailman had once been a mathematics
graduate... (more) |
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Math Takes a Holiday (2001) |
|
| Paul Di Filippo |
|
Saint Hubert and Saint Barbara, the two patron saints of mathematics,
pay a visit to a devout Catholic mathematics professor who has been
praying for a mathematical miracle to silence his mockers.... (more) |
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Mathematicians in Love (2006) |
|
| Rudy Rucker |
|
Together, two math grad students who are both in love with the same girl prove a theorem which characterizes all dynamical systems (from the stock market to the motion of particles) in terms of objects... (more) |
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The Mathematicians of Grizzly Drive (1988) |
|
| Josef Skvorecky |
|
A detective story, in the "hard boiled" genre, featuring Eve Adam, a sexy nightclub performer who solves crimes in her free time. In this story, she visits a house where mathematicians gather to entertain... (more) |
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Measuring the World (2006) |
|
| Daniel Kehlmann |
|
Two famous Germans of the 19th Century, mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and explorer/geologist Alexander von Humboldt, are irreverently presented in this novel which topped the sales charts in Germany... (more) |
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Mozart and the Whale (2005) |
|
| Petter Næss (Director) |
|
A romance about two people with Asperger's Syndrome based on a true story. I have not seen the film, but understand that the male character is obsessed with numbers and statistics but works as a cab driver.... (more) |
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The N-Plus-1th-Degree (1968) |
|
| Stephen Barr |
|
A mathematician is accused of murdering a man who flirted with his wife. Her faith in him (which is so strong, she describes it as being to the n-plus-1th degree) allows her to figure out how and by... (more) |
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Nachman at the Races (1999) |
|
| Leonard Michaels |
|
In Michaels' third Nachman story, we learn that the UCLA mathematician enjoys attending horse races -- apparently his only emotional outlet besides his mathematics research. There is discussion of the... (more) |
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Nachman Burning (1998) |
|
| Leonard Michaels |
|
In this story, the reclusive UCLA mathematician Nachman, a recurring character in stories by Leonard Michaels, gets a haircut. He chooses a barber he knows to be terrible at cutting hair, but he goes... (more) |
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Nachman from Los Angeles (2002) |
|
| Leonard Michaels |
|
This second "Nachman" story by Leonard Michaels is a flashback to a time when the UCLA mathematician was a graduate student and hired by a rich Arabian prince to ghostwrite a philosophy paper for him.... (more) |
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Newton's Hooke (2004) |
|
| David Pinner |
|
A play about Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke which presents "the dark side" of Newton. Emphasis is put on his egotism (not only does he think that he is incomparably brilliant, but he also seems to think... (more) |
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Of Mystery There Is No End (2002) |
|
| Leonard Michaels |
|
Leonard Michaels' recurring character of UCLA mathematician Nachman faces questions of infidelity when he learns of the extra-marital affairs of his friend Norbert and Norbert's wife.
It is somewhat... (more) |
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Only Say the Word (2005) |
|
| Niall Williams |
|
This novel about loss and grief includes a minor character (the protagonist's brother) who has mathematical talent and "retreats" into numbers. He believes that "for every problem there is a true and perfect solution" and eventually applies his skills to gambling (apparently providing the perfect solution to the problems of his life.) (more) |
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Orpheus Lost: A Novel (2007) |
|
| Janette Turner Hospital |
|
This book is simultaneously a beautiful love story with frequent allusions to the myth of Orpheus, a political thriller, and a gut wrenching tear jerker about people whose lives are destroyed by war. ... (more) |
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The Penultimate Conjecture (1999) |
|
| Leonard Michaels |
|
This is the most mathematical of Leonard Michaels' seven stories about the brilliant but anti-social UCLA mathematician, Nachman. In it, Nachman attends a conference in San Francisco at which a Swedish... (more) |
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A Person of Interest (2008) |
|
| Susan Choi |
|
Professor Lee, an older math professor at a small mid-western university becomes a suspect when a package bomb kills the young and popular professor in the office next to his. More of a serious psychological... (more) |
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Pieces of Pi (2006) |
|
| David Bartell |
|
A socially inept cubicle worker becomes obsessed with making sense of the controversial Biblical passage (I Kings 7:23-26) which many interpret as claiming that the value of π is exactly three (therefore... (more) |
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Probabilities (1995) |
|
| Michael Stein |
|
Sixteen year-old Will Sterling is the protagonist of this "coming of age story" that throws just a little math in with the usual teen-angst and sexual exploration.
The author is very good at letting you... (more) |
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Problems for Self-Study (2002) |
|
| Charles Yu |
|
The life of a mathematical physicist -- from earning his PhD, through marriage, fatherhood and into a midlife crisis -- presented in the form of homework exercises from a math book.
We first meet... (more) |
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Proof (2000) |
|
| David Auburn (playwright) |
|
This Pulitzer Prize winning play (now also a film) focuses on a daughter who took care of her father after his mental disorder forced him to give up his successful career as a mathematician. After the... (more) |
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Reality Conditions (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
The title story in the collection of the same name, this short story follows a mathematics grad student to a workshop at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. Although the story contains no supernatural... (more) |
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Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz (1997) |
|
| Irene Dische |
|
Like many other mathematicians in fiction (and in real life too?), the protagonist in this novel is brilliant when it comes to calculations but has difficulty with the most commonplace examples of human... (more) |
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The Sand-Reckoner (2000) |
|
| Gillian Bradshaw |
|
In this historical novel whose title is copied from one Archimedes' own works, the famous Greek mathematician is your typical math nerd, always
so wrapped up in his computations that he is barely aware... (more) |
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She Wrote the Book (1946) |
|
| Oscar Brodney (writer) / Warren Wilson (writer) / Charles Lamont (director) |
|
A modest and shy female math professor develops amnesia and completely changes her behavior when she comes to believe she is the author of steamy romance models. According to Burkard Polster and Marty... (more) |
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Slightly Perfect / Are you with it? (1941) |
|
| George Malcolm-Smith (Novel) / Sam Perrin (Script) / George Balzer (Script) |
|
Eggheaded actuary Milton Northey Haskins quits his job upon learning that his company has lost money due to his misplaced decimal point and he joins a carnival in the 1941 novel Slightly Perfect. This... (more) |
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Snow (1998) |
|
| Geoffrey A. Landis |
|
An apparently schizophrenic, homeless woman sells her body to get herself and her infant off the street on a cold night. Only at the end of this extremely short story do we realize that the imaginary... (more) |
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|
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Stand-In (1937) |
|
| Tay Garnett
|
|
Leslie Howard plays a typical Hollywood mathematical genius: emotionless, conceited, and convinced that everything can be understood through mathematics. (Well, one out of three isn't bad!) It takes a trip to Tinsel Town and a beautiful actress to make him see the errors of his ways.
(more) |
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The Stargazers (1986) |
|
| Barbara Susan Lefever |
|
An historical novel based on Mason and Dixon. (Includes references!) It was self-published in a first printing of 700, and a second printing of 200. The author is/was a member of the Pennsylvania Society... (more) |
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Straw Dogs (1971) |
|
| Sam Peckinpah (Director) |
|
Dustin Hoffman stars as an astrophysicist in this violent
Peckinpah film. Before the violence starts, Hoffman's wife plays a
trick on him by changing some signs (+/-) in an equation he is working
with.... (more) |
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Those Who Can, Do (1965) |
|
| Bob Kurosaka |
|
In this short-short classic, a mathematics professor ends the first day
of a Differential Equations class asking for questions. One student is
irksome, even peculiar, in his wish to know what practical... (more) |
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|
The Three Body Problem (2004) |
|
| Catherine Shaw |
|
A cleverly titled novel that uses a historical mathematical contest
and several characters based on real mathematicians as the basis for a
murder mystery. Of special interest is the novel's presentation... (more) |
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Threshold (2006) |
|
| Bragi F. Schut/ Brannon Braga / David S. Goyer / Dan O'Shannon |
|
This science fiction TV series featured a sarcastic dwarf mathematician character. According to Mathematics Goes to the Movies, mathematical highlights included a 4-dimensional alien object intersecting our world in the first episode, references to "isomorphic group therapy [sic]", "monotonic null sequences" and "quadratic reciprocity" in the second, and a strange statistical study in the 11th.
(more) |
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Towel Season (1998) |
|
| Ron Carlson |
|
A mathematician and his wife try to fit in with their suburban
neighbors. Perhaps the best description of the feel of what doing
mathematical research is really like. Much of the tension of the... (more) |
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Tracking the Random Variable (1991) |
|
| Marcos Donnelly |
|
Ronald Barr is a statistician with a knack for identifying hidden variables. For example, it was he who recognized that by offering chicken soup and hot chocolate in the automatic coffee machine, his... (more) |
|
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What Are the Odds? (2006) |
|
| Justin Spitzer (writer) / Matthew Tritt (director) |
|
Two extremely nerdy strangers who keep running into each other in New York City are surprised to learn that they both "study applied mathematics" and are attending the same conference on "stochastic processes... (more) |
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The Wild Numbers (1998) |
|
| Philibert Schogt |
|
Most mathematicians dream of proving a terribly important result. In
this novel, mathematician Isaac Swift
thinks he has done just that: solved "Beauregard's Wild Number
Problem". But is his proof... (more) |
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The Writing on the Wall (2005) |
|
| Steve Stanton |
|
When he was eight years old, David was visited by an image of his future self, causing him to write mathematical formulas on the wall. (Unfortunately, his parents paint over it before he has a chance... (more) |
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