 |
The Absolute Value of Mike (2011) |
 | Kathryn Erskine |
|
Mike is a fourteen-year-old with dyscalculia, but his father is a professional mathematician and is quite insistent that he should learn math and go to Newton High, the math magnet school. According to... (more) |
|
 |
Account Unsettled [Crime Impuni] (1954) |
 | Georges Simenon |
|
Elie is a Polish Jew who has come to study math in pre-war France. He is noticeably anti-social and awkward. He seems to be aware of the landlady's daughter, but neither to be in love with her nor sexually... (more) |
|
|
After Math (2013) |
|
| Denise Grover Swank |
|
This is a young adult novel about a college math major, a typical nerd with some apparent neuroses, who learns to be much more "normal" when she is forced to tutor a popular male soccer player.
Thanks to my student, Madeline Goodman, for bringing this book to my attention. (more) |
|
|
Alone with You in the Ether: A Love Story (2022) |
|
| Olivia Blake |
|
A bipolar artist and an obsessive mathematician who meet by chance get to know each other (and themselves) better through the course of six conversations. Although the artist already has a boyfriend,... (more) |
|
|
Along Came Polly (2004) |
|
| John Hamburg (Writer and Director) |
|
[This film] stars Ben Stiller as risk-assessing Actuary Reuben Feffer and Jennifer Aniston as love interest Polly Prince. Because Feffer must know the risks inherent in many situations, he becomes inhibited... (more) |
|
|
An Angel of Obedience (2010) |
|
| John Giessmann |
|
Due to his new obsession with fractal geometry, thirteen year-old prodigy Jackson Carter has just ended an illustrious career as a classical musician and enrolled as a math major at Harvard. There he... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Batorsag and Szerelem [a.k.a. Beautiful Ohio] (2006) |
|
| Ethan Canin |
|
A very sensitively written story about a child, William, who grows up in the shadow of his brother, Clive, who is a math prodigy. Clive, in addition to his strong mathematical skills, is also a very... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Bianca (1984) |
|
| Nanni Moretti (director and screenplay) |
|
A math teacher (played by Nanni Moretti himself) has odd obsessions and compulsions in this film, including his crush on colleague Bianca. Although his anti-social behavior seems to be destroying his... (more) |
|
|
The Big Short (2015) |
|
| Charles Randolph (writer) / Adam McKay (writer and director) |
|
Although I did very much enjoy this creative fictional adaptation of Michael Lewis' non-fictional account of mortgage induced US housing price collapse, I did not initially include it in this database.... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Body Counter (2018) |
|
| Anne Frasier |
|
Detective Jude Fontaine must stop a pathological killer whose murder sprees are dictated by the Fibonacci sequence.
Fontaine is known for her ability to read people. (She often can tell when people... (more) |
|
|
The Boy Who Escaped Paradise (2016) |
|
| J.M. Lee (author) / Chi-Young Kim (translator) |
|
After a body is found surrounded by mathematical formulas in Queens, a young Korean man named Gil-Mo is arrested for the murder. Because of his autistic tendencies, he does not respond at all to the usual... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
A Calculated Life (2013) |
|
| Anne Charnock |
|
This novel is about a brilliant mathematical modeler who works for big business finding correlations (such as that corporate reports tend to use nautical terminology when they are in trouble, even if they... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Capsule (2010) |
|
| Miceal Og O'Donnell (writer and director) |
|
A former mathematician who has tape on his glasses, a sleeping bag on his back and talks just like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Main is ordered by his doctor to be more social (to get out of his "capsule").... (more) |
|
|
Chronicles of a Comer (1972) |
|
| K.M O'Donnell (aka Barry N. Malzberg) |
|
A short story about a statistician who believes in the
second coming of Christ and looks for it in the statistical
correlations between the events and people's reactions to
those events (e.g. "14%... (more) |
|
|
The Circumference of the World (2023) |
|
| Lavie Tidhar |
|
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) |
|
|
The Code for Love and Heartbreak (2020) |
|
| Jillian Cantor |
|
In this young adult adaptation of Jane Austen's "Emma", a high school student unsuccessfully attempts to use her knowledge of mathematics to create a matchmaking app for her classmates. It is yet another... (more) |
|
|
Coffee, Love and Matrix Algebra (2014) |
|
| Gary Ernest Davis |
|
This novel follows a year in the life of Jeffrey Albacete, a mathematics professor at a Rhode Island University, who is best known as the author of a textbook on matrix algebra.
Although I think it... (more) |
|
|
La Conjecture de Syracuse (2008) |
|
| Antoine Billot |
|
Although in reality the Collatz Conjecture remains unresolved, in Billot's novel the problem was famously solved by Etienne Thèseus, who figured out the solution while he fought for France in Algeria... (more) |
|
|
The Crazy Mathematician (1964) |
|
| Ralph Sylvester Underwood |
|
Prof. Rumpel, a "genius touched by madness - a world sensation in the fields of mathematics, physics, astronomy - you name it", considers matter and spacetime to be infinitely divisible. Just like there... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
A Desirable Middle (2016) |
|
| Susan Sechrist |
|
In this story which appeared in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, a recently divorced woman contemplates her own tastes in things and seems especially concerned with the aspect ratios of the objects... (more) |
|
|
The Devotion of Suspect X [Yôgisha X no kenshin] (2005) |
|
| Keigo Higashino |
|
Reclusive high school math teacher Tetsuya Ishigami is "devoted" to two things: his math research and his neighbor, Yasuko Hanaoka. When Hanaoka and her daughter kill her abusive ex-husband, they are... (more) |
|
|
The Distant Dead (2020) |
|
| Heather Young |
|
When a boy named Sal discovers the burned body of his middle school math teacher, two amateur sleuths try to determine who killed him. One of them is Jake, the volunteer fireman to whom Sal initially... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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... (more) |
|
|
A Doubter's Almanac (2016) |
|
| Ethan Canin |
|
This literary novel follows the life of the fictional mathematical genius Milo Andret from his youth in Michigan, though his education at Berkeley and the winning of a Fields Medal as a Princeton math... (more) |
|
|
The Elusive Bullet (1931) |
|
| John Rhode (aka Cecil John Charles Street) |
|
Dr. Priestly is a professor whose hobby is "the mathematical detection of crime". In this story, he must convince the police inspector that the man he plans to accuse of murder is, in fact, innocent.
The... (more) |
|
|
End of Days (2011) |
|
| Eric Walters |
|
Although it appears to the world as if many of the leading scientists and mathematicians coincidentally died during the same year, what actually happened to them in this YA novel is that they were kidnapped... (more) |
|
|
The Equationist (2018) |
|
| J. D. Moyer |
|
An odd but mathematically gifted child named Niall understands the people around him by identifying their central "equation".
I have put the word in quotes because it seems that what he is really thinking... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Fear Index (2011) |
|
| Robert Harris |
|
Dr. Alex Hoffmann is an anti-social billionaire whose investment firm uses what he calls "Autonomous Machine Reasoning" (AMR) to make spectacular profits based on the Volatility Index (VIX), from which... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Gauntlet (2009) |
|
| Richard Aaron |
|
Autistic mathematician, Hamilton Turbee, helps stop a terrorist plot.
The book has received praise for its portrayal of an autism and as a thriller. Of course, I like to see mathematicians portrayed... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
|
|
Going Out (2002) |
|
| Scarlett Thomas |
|
A group of unusual friends go on a journey to Wales to meet with a healer who they hope can help each of them with their problems. The group consists of Luke (who is unable to go outside due to allergies... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Hajime's Algorithm (2017) |
|
| Mihara Kazuto |
|
A bitter old mathematician discovers a young prodigy while visiting the little Japanese island where he grew up in this ten volume manga series that ran from 2017-2020.
Uchida Yutaka is a mathematician... (more) |
|
|
The Happy Numbers of Julius Miles (2013) |
|
| Jim Keeble |
|
The characters in this twisted tale include a transexual "Cupid" with a drug problem, a crooked businessman, a Somali babysitter, a four-year old boy of unknown paternity, a London police officer, the... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Hell of a Fix (2009) |
|
| Matthew Hughes |
|
When an actuary's exclamation upon hitting his thumb with a hammer summons a demon, he unwittingly causes a general strike of the workers in Hell. With the help of a theologian with a bizarre theory to... (more) |
|
|
The Helpline (2019) |
|
| Katherine Collette |
|
In this work of fiction, an anti-social character who believes that all of life's questions can be answered by mathematics discovers that there's more to life than numbers. In this particular version... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
|
|
The Hurricane (2016) |
|
| R.J. Prescott |
|
A British novel in which a shy math student, damaged by her past, begins an unlikely romance with a powerful boxer. "Hurricane" O'Connell is handsome, muscular, and dangerous, but also happens to be madly... (more) |
|
|
Imaginary Numbers (2020) |
|
| Seanan McGuire |
|
Sarah Zellaby, a running character in McGuire's InCryptid books, is featured prominently in this entry from the series. Sarah's species evolved from insects in another dimension but look essentially like... (more) |
|
|
The Imitation Game (2014) |
|
| Morten Tyldum (director) / Graham Moore (screenplay) |
|
This film about Alan Turing and his role in breaking the Nazi enigma code has been a critical and financial success. It has won numerous awards and brought huge crowds of people to see a movie about a... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Intangible (2022) |
|
| C.J. Washington |
|
Amanda is a data scientist who continues to show signs of pregnancy even after her miscarriage. Marissa is a math professor overwhelmed with guilt after a fatal accident. Their husbands are both non-mathematicians... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Invisible (2014) |
|
| James Patterson / David Ellis |
|
The (somewhat unlikeable) protagonist of this thriller is an FBI agent who loved numbers as a little girl and still prefers statistical analysis of data to time spent with other people. Combining this anti-social behavior with an obsessive desire to find a pattern among a huge number of unsolved murders leads her to begin her own investigation. (more) |
|
|
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... (more) |
|
|
Invisibly Breathing (2019) |
|
| Eileen Merriman |
|
Felix Catalan, a teenager whose autistic tendencies make him unpopular in school, becomes romantically involved with another student whose stutter similarly makes him an outcast.
Like many other anti-social... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Der kalte Himmel (2011) |
|
| Johannes Fabrick (director)
/ Andrea Stoll (writer) |
|
In this German film, a woman raising her children on a farm in 1967 tries to get help for her mathematically talented but anti-social son. Obtaining the services of a forward-thinking Berlin psychiatrist,... (more) |
|
|
Kapitoil (2010) |
|
| Teddy Wayne |
|
It is 1999 and Karim Issar is a Qatari programmer who has just moved to NYC to work on Wall Street. Karim understands the world through mathematics and equations, and wishes others did as well. He does... (more) |
|
|
Kazohinia [A Voyage to Kazohinia] (1941) |
|
| Sándor Szathmári |
|
This novel features a Gulliver-like character (coincidentally named "Gulliver") who washes ashore in a strange land after a shipwreck. He first stays with the extremely logical Hins, who are always sensible... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Kim Possible (Episode: Mathter and Fervent) (2007) |
|
| Jim Peronto (script) |
|
This episode of the Disney animated TV series "Kim Possible" is a comic book parody featuring a mathematical villain.
As an English assignment, Kim Possible and Ron Stoppable have to write a paper... (more) |
|
|
The Last Enemy (2008) |
|
| Peter Berry (Screenplay) / Iain B. MacDonald (Director) |
|
In this BBC TV series, mathematician Stephen Ezard (Benedict Cumberbatch) returns home from China for his brother's funeral but finds himself caught up in two simultaneous stories of high level espionage.... (more) |
|
|
Le larmes de saint Laurent (Wonder) (2010) |
|
| Dominique Fortier |
|
The three separate stories that comprise this book are tied together by common themes of romance, death and volcanism. It is because of the second story, entitled "Harmony of the Spheres", that I am including... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Leeches (2011) |
|
| David Albahari |
|
Serb author David Albahari's avant-garde novel about a newspaper columnist caught up in a Kabbalistic plot is notable in that it is written as a single, unbroken paragraph. It is also sort of interesting,... (more) |
|
|
Life After Genius (2008) |
|
| M. Ann Jacoby |
|
Although his family would normally expect him to stay in their small town and take over the family business (a combination of a furniture store and funeral home), Mead Fegley's "genius" gives him the unprecedented... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Lure (2007) |
|
| Bill Napier |
|
Irish mathematician Tom Petrie is called in as an expert to analyze a mysterious stream of particles that appears to be a message from aliens. The math never gets very deep. Petrie is supposed to be... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Magpie Lane (2020) |
|
| Lucy Atkins |
|
This wonderful novel is difficult to describe, somewhere between literary fiction and a procedural mystery with the atmosphere of a supernatural thriller. The book is narrated by Dee, a nanny who is being... (more) |
|
|
Maid of Murder (2010) |
|
| Amanda Flower |
|
Like the author of this murder mystery, protagonist India Hayes is a librarian at a small midwestern college. Presumably unlike the author, Hayes must prove the innocence of her mathematician brother... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Math is Murder (2012) |
|
| Robert C. Brigham / James B. Reed |
|
This is a murder mystery co-written by an emeritus math professor and a retired crime scene investigator. The victim was an egotistical and (almost unbelievably) unpleasant mathematics department chair... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Mathematician (1997) |
|
| George Weinberg |
|
“Peter K was the first person on earth ever to invert a skew symmetric matrix by pressing a button”. So begins the story, set in the years where computers had just started making a foray... (more) |
|
|
A Mathematician's Galatea (2010) |
|
| Andrew Magrath |
|
As the author describes this story on his blog:
["Inhuman: Absolute XPress Flash Fiction Challenge #4" is] an anthology of stories all written from the perspective of a non-human character. I liked... (more) |
|
|
The Mathematician's Shiva (2014) |
|
| Stuart Rojstaczer |
|
When Rachela Karnokovich dies, her family's attempt to conduct the Jewish mourning ritual of sitting shiva is disturbed by the many strangers who descend on her Madison, WI home. Although she never won... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Mathematician’s Heaven (1912) |
|
| Hunter Frances |
|
An utterly trite, juvenile story which one wants to rescue only because of its long age and the fact that it was published in something as cutely named as “Tipyn O’bob” (a magazine run by students... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Mentalist (Episode: 18-5-4) (2010) |
|
| Bruno Heller (writer) / Leonard Dick (writer) / Charles Beeson (director) |
|
In this episode of the series about agents from the California Bureau of Investigation, an unemployed mathematician is murdered by someone wearing a clown suit.
The victim, Noah Valiquette, was a... (more) |
|
|
Midnight Diner (Episode: Omelette Rice) (2016) |
|
| Joji Matsuoka (Director)
/ Marina Oshima (Screenplay) |
|
Each episode of this Japanese TV series follows the stories of some patrons of a Tokyo diner that is only open from midnight to 7AM. "Omelette Rice" is a love story between two regulars who meet there... (more) |
|
|
The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996) |
|
| Barbra Streisand (director) / Richard LaGravenese (Writer) |
|
Love story with Jeff Bridges and Barbra Streisand as math and English
professors (respectively) at Columbia University in which they try (unsuccessfully) to achieve a marriage of deep companionship but... (more) |
|
|
The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl (2018) |
|
| Stacy McAnulty |
|
A girl who developed "genius level" mathematical abilities after being struck by lightning has a thing or two to learn about life in this novel for young adults.
Lucy Callahan finds that after her... (more) |
|
|
Moment of Madness (2002) |
|
| Una-Mary Parker |
|
When her father, a brilliant but somewhat twisted mathematical statistician, dies unexpectedly, a woman is forced by his will to distribute valuable jewels to all of the women with whom he has cheated... (more) |
|
|
Mother's Milk (2005) |
|
| Andrew Thomas Breslin |
|
Lawyer Cindy Kichlklug takes on the dairy industry (with the aid of a quirky mathematician) in this witty SF satire.
The "conspiracy theory" in the book is well put together. It tightly combines so... (more) |
|
|
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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Murder and Mendelssohn (Phryne Fisher Mystery) (2014) |
|
| Kerry Greenwood |
|
As a fan of the Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries TV Series, I was pleased to see that the 20th novel in the series that inspired it features a mathematician, giving me an excuse to read it.
Phryne Fisher... (more) |
|
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My Heart Belongs to Bertie (2018) |
|
| Helen DeWitt |
|
This short story, which appears in the anthology "Some Trick: Thirteen Stories by Helen DeWitt" features an academic turned author arguing with a literary agent who wants him to include less math in his... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Nagel im Himmel (2020) |
|
| Patrick Hofmann |
|
The protagonist in this novel grows up in a loveless, dysfunctional family, but finds refuge and success in mathematics until he is "saved" by a physicist.
Since I do not read German, my knowledge of... (more) |
|
|
The New Warriors (Issue #4) (1990) |
|
| Fabian Nicieza (writer) / Mark Bagley (artist) |
|
The New Warriors were a team of Marvel superheroes whose enemies included the psychic mathematical genius known as Mathemanic. Mathemanic first appeared in issue #4 (October 1990) but also appeared in... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
No Chance (2001) |
|
| Guy Hasson |
|
While playing poker, a math professor and a biology professor discuss the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, with the mathematician offering what he sees as a mathematical argument proving... (more) |
|
|
The Number of Love (The Codebreakers) (2019) |
|
| Roseanna M. White |
|
This novel may fall into an unlikely combination of categories (it is a wartime religious historical romance spy story that is also mathematical), but its main character is a familiar stereotype: Margot... (more) |
|
|
The Odd Women (1893) |
|
| George Gissing |
|
This is one of many Victorian novels about romance, gender and class, but it has aged well. Among the several relationships it considers is one between a mathematician, the author of "A Treatise on Trilinear... (more) |
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Odds Against Tomorrow (2013) |
|
| Nathaniel Rich |
|
Mitchell Zukor is a statistician and probabilist whose area of expertise is the prediction of disasters. To many people, including the reporter/narrator, this makes him a humorous and pathetic number... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Old Mathematician (from Maschalk Manor) (1848) |
|
| Anonymous |
|
A very charming, humorous description of the final days of an old man who retires to a small Dutch hamlet where no one knows him. While any arrival of a stranger in a tiny community is always a cause... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Onto Infinity (2002) |
|
| David Alex |
|
A young mathematician and his older wife struggle to accept her fate as she slowly dies of cancer.
As you might guess since I maintain a website on mathematical fiction, I am not one of those who see... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Outer Limits (Episode: Behold, Eck!) (1964) |
|
| John Mantley (screenplay) / William R. Cox (story) |
|
In this episode of the classic science fiction series Outer Limits, a 2-dimensional being trapped in our world is aided by Dr. Stone, an engineer described as being an expert in "optical geometry" and... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Perelman’s Refusal [Les Refus de Grigori Perelman]
(2017) |
|
| Philippe Zaouati |
|
I was quite concerned when I first heard that the American Mathematical Society was publishing this "novel"
that promised "to immerse [the reader] in the tormented mind" of Grigori Perelman. I became... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Porter Piper (1849) |
|
| Anonymous |
|
A very light, very badly stereotyped, two-dimensional story about one Porter Piper. He was a born genius, one destined to be a top-class mathematician. So much so that when he was delivered by his mother,... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Proof (2000) |
|
| David Auburn |
|
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) |
|
|
The Quantum Weirdness of the Almost-Kiss (2021) |
|
| Amy Noelle Parks |
|
In this young adult romance, Evie Beckham is an extremely anxious teenager who loves math and attends a STEM magnet school. She is starting to get interested in dating, but is unaware that her longtime... (more) |
|
|
Question 3 (2016) |
|
| Martin Sandahl (Director and Writer) |
|
A short film about a boy with Asperger's Syndrome who competes in the International Mathematical Olympiad. However, neither the mathematical problems nor the boy's success in the competition is the main... (more) |
|
|
The Rabbit Factor [Jäniskerroin] (2020) |
|
| Antti Tuomainen |
|
After his anti-social tendencies get him fired from his job as an actuary, the mathematically obsessed Henri inherits his deceased brother's adventure park, along with his tremendous debt to a dangerous... (more) |
|
|
Randall and the River of Time (1950) |
|
| Cecil Scott Forester |
|
Charles Randall meets two people who change his life while he is on leave from fighting in World War I: a patent lawyer for whom he designs an improved flare and the seductive wife of a fellow soldier.... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Satisfactory Proof (2005) |
|
| Cynthia Morrison Phoel |
|
A Master's degree student pouts and complains about the people around him as he earns his Master's degree in mathematics at a Bulgarian university.
Although the titular phrase "satisfactory proof" appears... (more) |
|
|
Secrets to the Grave (2011) |
|
| Tami Hoag |
|
Mathematician Zander Zahn is suspected of having murdered an artist in this follow-up to the novel "Deeper than the Dead". Almost no mathematics is actually discussed, not even the tiny amount one often... (more) |
|
|
Seven Wonders (2014) |
|
| Ben Mezrich |
|
The hero of this conspiracy theory adventure has -- or had -- a twin brother who was an anti-social, OCD math genius precisely following the standard literary stereotype. However, he was murdered after... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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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|
|
The Song of the Geometry Instructor (1985) |
|
| Ralph M. Berry |
|
While snowed in at his home, a geometer writes to his former lover about his students, his discoveries and how much he misses her.
This is one of those literary art pieces by an author for whom mathematics... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Strike Your Heart (2017) |
|
| Amélie Nothomb |
|
This French novel is primarily about jealousy and how it poisons relationships between women. However, one recurring minor character is a Fields medalist working in topology. Like many mathematicians... (more) |
|
|
The Theory of (Not Quite) Everything (2023) |
|
| Kara Gnodde |
|
Mimi Brotherton is a Foley artist in London who creates sound effects for movies. There is not much mathematics in that, but three of the men in her life are mathematicians: her father, her brother, and... (more) |
|
|
The Theory of Death (2015) |
|
| Faye Kellerman |
|
The apparent suicides of a math student and math professor at Kneed Loft College are investigated by a detective, his wife, and a former detective now studying law. It was sufficiently engrossing and... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Time Travel for Love and Profit (2021) |
|
| Sarah Lariviere |
|
Nephele Weather's nerdy tendencies made her an outcast at school. Since her "only superpower is math", she decides to discover the equations of time travel so that she can repeat her freshman year and... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Verrechnet (2009) |
|
| Carl Djerassi/Isabella Gregor |
|
With the help of playwright/director Isabella Gregor, Djerassi updated his play Calculus (Newton's Whores). The plot still revolves around the question of priority on the invention of calculus, and especially... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
White Rabbit, Red Wolf [This Story is a Lie] (2018) |
|
| Tom Pollock |
|
Seventeen-year-old Peter Blankman is afraid of most things, but he loves his mother (a famous research psychologist), his twin sister (a tough girl who looks out for him), and math. So, he is in trouble... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Zero (2009) |
|
| Buzz Mauro |
|
An awkward, middle-aged math teacher stumbles (quite literally) into a sexual relationship with an unusual young woman.
The character occasionally thinks in mathematical terms. Towards the beginning,... (more) |
|
|
The Zero Theorem (2013) |
|
| Pat Rushin (screenplay) / Terry Gilliam (director) |
|
Qohen Leth corrects people who call him a number cruncher: he's an entity cruncher. Even though he is very good at his job, processing data in the office at his company's famous cube-based computer terminals,... (more) |
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