 |
1 to 999 (1981) |
 | Isaac Asimov |
|
When cryptologists try to break a simple code, one of the key clues is
the frequency with which letters appear. In English, the letter "a"
is one of the most frequently used letters. It is therefore... (more) |
|
 |
1963 (1993) |
 | Alan Moore |
|
A six-issue series, one of the best of the retro comics out
there. this is Moore's ingenious pastiche of Marvel comics in
the critical (for Marvel and for the world) year 1963. Strange
things... (more) |
|
|
2+2=5 (2006) |
|
| Rudy Rucker / Terry Bisson |
|
A retired insurance adjuster and a math professor who was fired for telling his students that there are "holes" in the number line pass the time by trying to break a world record for counting. To achieve... (more) |
|
|
21 (2008) |
|
| Robert Luketic (Director) |
|
As I understand it, the book by Ben Mezrich which inspired this film is non-fiction. It told the true story (though using pseudonyms) of a team comprised of an MIT math professor and six MIT students... (more) |
|
|
21 Grams (2003) |
|
| Alejandro González Iñárritu |
|
I have not yet seen this film in which Sean Penn portrays a critically ill mathematician. The title is apparently taken from the results of the bizarre (hard to believe and never reproduced) experiments... (more) |
|
|
The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri (2008) |
|
| David Bajo |
|
Philip is a mathematician who works in the financial industry, a quant. We also meet his ex-wife, Rebecca, who is a math professor. But, the main character in this novel is a woman who we only meet in... (more) |
|
|
36 Arguments for the Existence of God (2010) |
|
| Rebecca Goldstein |
|
This new novel from Goldstein, whose Strange Attractors is one of my favorite works of mathematical fiction, is set to come out in January 2010. According to the jacket copy, a woman known as "the goddess... (more) |
|
|
The 39 Steps (1935) |
|
| Alfred Hitchcock (director) |
|
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 thriller follows the getaway of Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), a man accused of murder. While Hannay must outsmart the police in his escape, he also finds himself sought... (more) |
|
|
7 Steps to Midnight (1993) |
|
| Richard Matheson |
|
In this unnerving, `Kafka-esque' suspense novel by well known horror author Richard Matheson, a government mathematician sees reality collapse around him as his life is turned into a surrealistic version... (more) |
|
|
A. Botts and the Moebius Strip (1945) |
|
| William Hazlett Upson |
|
William Hazlett Upson wrote a series of pieces for the Saturday Evening Post about a salesman for The Earthworm Tractor Company, written as a dialog of letters and memos between Alexander Botts and his... (more) |
|
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Abendland (Occident) (2007) |
|
| Michael Köhlmeier |
|
The protagonist is an Austrian
mathematician who, according to the fictional invention of the author,
worked with Emmy Noether in Göttingen during the 'Golden Age' of
German Mathematics, i.e. before Hitler came to power. In chapter 6 we
learn a lot about Noether's life in Göttingen, Moscow, and the US.
(more) |
|
|
An Abundance of Katherines (2006) |
|
| John Green |
|
Colin Singleton is a semi-burnt-out child prodigy who spends a summer coming of age as he develops a theorem to account for the fact that he's been dumped by nineteen girls, all named Katherine. Includes... (more) |
|
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The Accidental Time Machine (2007) |
|
| Joe Haldeman |
|
A few mathematical ideas are tossed around casually in this light and entertaining science fiction story about a lab assistant who realizes before his boss that the device they are working on can be used... (more) |
|
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According to the Law (1996) |
|
| Solvej Balle |
|
Four interconnected stories are told which wrap around onto themselves like a Mobius strip. But, it is not only the structure of the story that is mathematical. In the first we meet a biochemist who... (more) |
|
|
The Adding Machine (1923) |
|
| Elmer Rice |
|
This highly symbolic play tells the life, death, afterlife, and
rebirth of Zero, a mild-mannered nobody who is hoping to get a raise
for twenty five years of loyal service as a clerk doing addition... (more) |
|
|
Advanced Calculus of Murder (1988) |
|
| Erik Rosenthal |
|
In the second book in the Dan Brodsky series (following Calculus of Murder by the same author), Brodsky is invited to COTCA (the Conference on Operator Theory and C*-Algebras at Oxford University). While... (more) |
|
|
Adventure of the Final Problem (1893) |
|
| Sir Arthur Conan Doyle |
|
This first Sherlock Holmes story about Professor Moriarty (later to be
viewed as Holmes' arch enemy) introduces him as a professor of
mathematics who won fame as a young man for his extension of the
binomial... (more) |
|
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The Adventure of the Russian Grave (1995) |
|
| William Barton / Michael Capobianco |
|
17 years after the death of Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes comes across some loose ends
involving Moriarty. Following these clues down into eastern Siberia with
Watson, a set of mathematical calculations... (more) |
|
|
Adventures of Penrose the Mathematical Cat (1997) |
|
| Theoni Pappas |
|
This is a book of vignettes discussing math topics rather than a novel or a true short story. The author (Pappas) uses the exploits of her cat, Penrose, to present topics in a fun way. For example,... (more) |
|
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The Adventures of the Parrot (2008) |
|
| Gary Brown |
|
Gary I. Brown, chair of the math department at CSBSJU in St. Joseph MN, has written two detective stories in which "The Parrot" uses mathematics (specifically, non-zero sum games and fair division problems) to solve the mysteries. The stories appear together in a new book from North Star Press which is available from Amazon.com .
(more) |
|
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The Adventures of Topology Man (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
Parody is easy....topology is hard!
In this short story, I made use of (and made fun of) the classic superhero comic book genre to illustrate some ideas from topology. So, we end up seeing a battle... (more) |
|
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After Math (1997) |
|
| Miriam Webster |
|
The ghost of math professor Ray Bellwether tries to solve the mystery of
his own murder in this `first novel' by Amy Babich (Webster is just a
pseudonym). Babich has a Ph.D. in mathematics (and a Master's... (more) |
|
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Against the Day (2006) |
|
| Thomas Pynchon |
|
This novel, set in the time frame 1890s to 1920s interleaves several
plots and styles, from boys' adventures to peacetime spies to gunslingers'
revenges. The forces of progress stomp over all the... (more) |
|
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Against the Odds (2001) |
|
| Martin Gardner |
|
Luther Washington, a young, African-American boy in Butterfield, KS must overcome several kinds of prejudice to become a mathematician.
First, he must face the prejudices of his father that his interest... (more) |
|
|
Agora (2009) |
|
| Alejandro Amenábar (writer and director) / Mateo Gil (writer) |
|
A film based on the life of Hypatia of Alexandria. What little we know of the real Hypatia suggests that she was a talented mathematician and teacher (neither of them easy professions for a woman to enter... (more) |
|
|
Albert's Bridge (1967) |
|
| Tom Stoppard |
|
A radio play about a philosophy graduate student who gets a job painting the Clufton Bay Bridge. It takes him and three other workers exactly two years to paint the entire bridge, at which time they must... (more) |
|
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The Aleph (1945) |
|
| Jorge Luis Borges |
|
One of Borges' most famous stories. The narrator (called Borges) is invited by his friend the mediocre poet Daneri to see the Aleph he has in his basement, explaining that an Aleph is a point from which... (more) |
|
|
Aleph Sub One (1948) |
|
| Margaret St. Clair |
|
This is a little known story by a well known author from the Golden Age of Science Fiction. The math content is high, and it's a good story, definitely belongs on your Mathematical Fiction page.
From... (more) |
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|
Alex Detail's Revolution (2009) |
|
| Darren Campo |
|
A teenage genius uses (among other things) knowledge of the Golden Ratio to defeat an alien invasion. Campo handles the description of the math a bit better than some other authors ([cough]...Dan Brown...[cough]) but in the end it is nothing other than a bit of unbelievable mumbo jumbo in an otherwise math-free Sci-Fi adventure.
(more) |
|
|
The Algebraist (2005) |
|
| Iain M. Banks |
|
Fassin Taak is a human in the year 4034 who has the job of communicating with the alien species known as "the dwellers". Since the dweller culture is billions of years old, they have accumulated tremendous... (more) |
|
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Algorithms and Nasal Structures (1998) |
|
| Lois H. Gresh |
|
This short story appears "in Aboriginal Science Fiction, Summer 1998.
CS grad student is having trouble programming sheep odors.
The story competently uses real programming terminology
(stacks, queues, etc). Includes a wee bit of trigonometry.
(more) |
|
|
All on a Golden Afternoon (1956) |
|
| Robert Bloch |
|
"The title alludes to Alice in Wonderland, and the story is
indeed partly set in the two dream books. One Professor Laroc
has extended some mathematical work of Charles Dodgson, and by
... (more) |
|
|
Alphabet (2002) |
|
| Chelsea Spear |
|
A silent, short film which shows intertwined clips of a young girl playing the french horn and answering a question at the board in her algebra class. Reviews of the film that I've read suggest that she... (more) |
|
|
Altar of Eden (2009) |
|
| James Rollins |
|
"Fractals" is the buzz word in this adventure novel in which a veterinarian discovers seemingly mutated animals who were unwittingly brought back to the US by Black Market traders. Including vague references... (more) |
|
|
Amy and Isabelle (1998) |
|
| Elizabeth Stout |
|
A highly praised mother-daughter novel, selected by Oprah, and
recently produced by Oprah as a made-for-TV movie.
Set in 1971 Maine, a 16-year-old girl has an affair with her
high school math... (more) |
|
|
Anathem (2008) |
|
| Neal Stephenson |
|
This ambitious novel takes place on a world in which it is the theoretical scientists and mathematicians (rather than the theologians as on our planet) who have cloistered themselves in ascetic communes,... (more) |
|
|
And Be a Villain (1948) |
|
| Rex Stout |
|
Rex
Stout and his seventy some Nero Wolfe novels are generally regarded as
amongst the greatest mystery novels ever written. They read as fresh today
as when the series started in 1934, and they... (more) |
|
|
And He Built a Crooked House (1940) |
|
| Robert A. Heinlein |
|
A clever architect designs a house in the shape of the shadow of a
tesseract, but it collapses (through
the 4th dimension) when an earthquake shakes it into a more stable form (which takes up very... (more) |
|
|
Aniara (1956) |
|
| Harry Martinson |
|
Aniara is considered one of the greatest works of Swedish author
Harry Martinson, 1974 Nobel Prize in Literature co-winner "for
writings that catch the dewdrop and reflect the cosmos". It is
an epic... (more) |
|
|
Another New Math (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
A mathematician and his young daughter try to convince a school board to consider teaching advanced mathematics to elementary school children in this short story that appeared in the collection Reality... (more) |
|
|
Antibodies (2000) |
|
| Charles Stross |
|
P vs NP is perhaps the greatest problem of theoretical computer science,
and has attracted attention of a range of mathematicians, from logic
to topology. It's one of the seven Clay Millennium Prize... (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) |
|
|
Apartheid, Superstrings and Mordecai Thubana (1991) |
|
| Michael Bishop |
|
I don't want to get into a debate here about whether superstrings are math or physics. I know mathematicians and physicists who would argue (with some good points on each side) that it is in their area... (more) |
|
|
The Appendix and the Spectacles (1928) |
|
| Miles J. Breuer (M.D.) |
|
There sometimes seems to be an unlimited supply of stories based on
the idea that we may be unaware of extra dimensions around us (just
like the inhabitants of Flatland). But, each
one has its own special features. Here we see it from a medical
perspective: what are the implications for surgery and malpractice?
Appears in Mathematical Magpie. (more) |
|
|
Applied Mathematical Theology (2006) |
|
| Gregory Benford |
|
Benford, a physicist and science fiction author, wrote this piece about a message hidden in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB) for the journal Nature's "Futures" column. It cites (fictional)... (more) |
|
|
Approaching Perimelasma (1998) |
|
| Geoffrey A. Landis |
|
As part of a planned experiment, a man falls into a black hole and escapes through a wormhole. (Don't worry, it is only a backup copy of his mind on an artificial body specifically designed for this task.)... (more) |
|
|
Arcadia (1993) |
|
| Tom Stoppard |
|
Stoppard's critically successful play includes long discussions of topics of
mathematical interest including: Fermat's Last Theorem and Newtonian
determinism, iterated algorithms, the second law of thermodynamics,
Fourier's... (more) |
|
|
Archimedes, a planetarium opera (2007) |
|
| James Dashow |
|
Opera, as in people singing and music playing, and not the
usual Latin for "works".
James Dashow has been scripting, composing, and recording
Archimedes, a "planetarium opera" for the past ten years.
It's... (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) |
|
|
Art Thou Mathematics? (1978) |
|
| Charles Mobbs |
|
Short story (Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, October 1978 Vol. 98 No 10) concerning the very nature of mathematical discovery. It was later rewritten in the form of a play, which the author has... (more) |
|
|
Artifact (1985) |
|
| Gregory Benford |
|
In this novel a team of scientists investigates a mysterious
archaeological find. It soon becomes apparent that more than just
archaelogy will be needed to understand it, and so a pair of physicists... (more) |
|
|
As Above, So Below (2009) |
|
| Rudy Rucker |
|
An LSD of a story - in typical Rucker style - where a computer programmer working with the Mandelbrot set is visited upon by a living UFO in the form of the M-set; the UFO named Ma explains to him how... (more) |
|
|
The Atrocity Archives (2004) |
|
| Charles Stross |
|
"The Laundry" is a British spy organization which is responsible for suppressing certain dangerous math research. The occult implications of mathematics became clear with Alan Turing's paper "Phase Conjugate... (more) |
|
|
Aurora in Four Voices (1998) |
|
| Catherine Asaro |
|
Jato is trapped in Nightingale, a city in permanent
darkness, inhabited by mathematical artists who mostly ignore him. Soz
arrives to repair her ship, meets Jato, and finds... (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) |
|
|
Back to Methuselah (1921) |
|
| George Bernard Shaw |
|
In this not-very-stageable play in five parts, Shaw expounds on
mankind and the theory of evolution, from Adam and Eve in the
Garden of Eden to a paradise world 30,000 years in the future.
It turns... (more) |
|
|
Bad Boy Brawley Brown (2002) |
|
| Walter Mosley |
|
This is the sixth book in the highly praised Easy Rawlins mysteries
that began with DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS. They are set in post-WWII
black Los Angeles, and unfold over the years. (The... (more) |
|
|
The Balloon Hoax (1844) |
|
| Edgar Allan Poe |
|
This is Poe's account of an alleged balloon trip to the
moon, in the spirit of the then infamous moon hoax. The
balloon rider describes the Earth as appearing concave when
5 miles up. Later,... (more) |
|
|
The Bank (2001) |
|
| Robert Connolly |
|
A brilliant young mathematician (aren't they all!) uses chaos theory to develop a mathematical model that predicts the stock market in this Australian thriller (co-produced by Axiom Films) .
I love... (more) |
|
|
Barking (2007) |
|
| Tom Holt |
|
Duncan Hughes has had a rather monotonous and trite career as an
estate and tax lawyer when suddenly werewolves, vampires, zombies,
and one impossibly alluring unicorn, along with his ex-wife and his
old... (more) |
|
|
Battle of the Frog and the Mouse (1984) |
|
| John Barrow |
|
This succinct, well-writtten fable captures the polemics between Hilbert and Brouwer related to Hilbert's Formalist position and Brouwer's Constructivist position vis a vis the foundations of mathematics... (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) |
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|
|
Been a long, long time (1970) |
|
| R. A. Lafferty |
|
It's a very well-written humorous tale (as expected if you're familiar with Lafferty). The mathematical content is a literal interpretation of the six typing monkeys. The angel Boshel, as a punishment,... (more) |
|
|
The Bees of Knowledge (1975) |
|
| Barrington J. Bayley |
|
It's a story about a traveller marooned on a planet, part of which is populated by giant bees which collect the "nectar of knowledge" and make "honey of experience" out of that nectar. The story has a... (more) |
|
|
Belonging to Karovsky (2002) |
|
| Kathryn Schwille |
|
This short story, published in the literary magazine Crazyhorse concerns the boring and lonely Mr. Digby who was the downstairs neighbor of Karovsky, the brilliant (but of course, seriously insane) mathematician... (more) |
|
|
The Better Mousetrap (2008) |
|
| Tom Holt |
|
The Better Mousetrap is the fifth book in Tom Holt's
series that began with The Portable Door. The first
four books told the adventures of Paul Carpenter, a fairly
boring nobody who joined the... (more) |
|
|
Beyond the Limit: The Dream of Sofya Kovalevskaya (2002) |
|
| Joan Spicci |
|
This book is a novelized account of the life of
Sofia Kovalevskaya (aka Sonia Kovalevskey and infinitely many alternative
spellings), famous today as the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in
mathematics.... (more) |
|
|
Big Numbers (1990) |
|
| Alan Moore / Bill Sienkiewicz |
|
This comic book (written by Moore and illustrated by Sienkiewicz) was planned as a 12 issue series with a mathematics theme. Unfortunately, due to a lack of cooperation by the artist (and also a substitute... (more) |
|
|
Bill, the Galactic Hero (1965) |
|
| Harry Harrison |
|
The famed parody of Asimov and Heinlein. Amongst other issues,
the book asks what happens to all the garbage from a one city
planet (a la Trantor from FOUNDATION)? It seems to be a losing
... (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 Bishop Murder Case (1929) |
|
| S.S. van Dine (pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright) |
|
Our hero, Vance, says at the end of this mystery novel: "At the outset I was able to postulate a mathematician as the criminal agent. The difficulty of naming the murderer lay in the fact that nearly... (more) |
|
|
Black Mask of Al-Jabr (1967) |
|
| Vladimir Levshin |
|
The 3 friends return to Karlikania. Their friend, the baby zero, is accosted by a mysterious x-shaped stranger, who challenges our heroes to recover his identity. Many adventures unfold, and the... (more) |
|
|
The Black Mirror (1983) |
|
| Eric Simon |
|
This story (available in "The Black Mirror and Other Stories"
and first published in the anthology, "Ways to Impossibility", 1983) is an interesting twist on the idea of one-sided surfaces. Based on... (more) |
|
|
Blasphemy (2008) |
|
| Douglas Preston |
|
Douglas Preston’s novel, “Blasphemy”, contains a few mathematical references that come up when scientists encounter “God” at the (hypothetical) world’s largest particle collider, SSC II.... (more) |
|
|
The Blind Geometer (1987) |
|
| Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
This short novel lives up to its name: it really is about a blind
geometer! Carlos Oleg Nevsky was born blind and ``since 2043'' has
been a professor of mathematics at GWU. We get some interesting
discussion... (more) |
|
|
Blinding Shadows (1934) |
|
| Donald Wandrei |
|
Story of a mathematics professor who theorizes that 4-dimensional objects should be casting 3-dimensional shadows and such shadows should be viewable by specially made mirrors. Dutifully, element number... (more) |
|
|
BLIT (1988) |
|
| David Langford |
|
Goedelian incompleteness is encoded in graphic images that
kill viewers. A new kind of infoterrorism spreads.
Originally published in INTERZONE #25 Sept/Oct 1988.
See also a fake FAQ... (more) |
|
|
Bloom (1998) |
|
| Wil McCarthy |
|
In between blooms of a deadly manmade fungus, the humans discuss cellular automata (especially Conway's Game of Life) and complexity theory.
Thanks to Rob Milson for suggesting this book.
(more) |
|
|
Blowups Happen (1940) |
|
| Robert A. Heinlein |
|
A mathematician discovers that his formulas predict that an important
new power station poses an extremely grave risk to humanity, and he
must convince others of the danger.
reprinted in THE PAST... (more) |
|
|
The Blue Door (2006) |
|
| Tanya Barfield |
|
A successful African-American mathematics professor who has tried to ignore racism and its implications for his life is visited by his ancestors during a sleepless night in this critically acclaimed new... (more) |
|
|
Boltzmann's Ghost (1998) |
|
| Ken Wharton |
|
A physicist encounters an apparently crazy man who tries to convince him
that some beings experience time backwards. His intriguing explanation of
this phenomenon depends on theoretical physics, and... (more) |
|
|
The Bones of Time (1996) |
|
| Kathleen Ann Goonan |
|
A young 21st century mathematician named Cen (short for Century) Kalakaua falls in love with a 19th century Hawaiian princess when they meet through an unusual temporal phenomenon. He becomes obsessed... (more) |
|
|
The Book of Getting Even (2009) |
|
| Benjamin Taylor |
|
A brilliant homosexual teenager uses mathematics as an escape from the pressures of everyday life, including his father, a rabbi in 1970's New Orleans. Along the way, he gets to know (and love, in a variety of ways) the family of a Nobel prize winning physicist and he himself becomes a cosmologist.
(more) |
|
|
The Book of Irrational Numbers (1999) |
|
| Michael Marshall Smith |
|
The protagonist of this short story views everything through the filter of numerology. His journal entries detail his considerations of digital roots, perfect numbers, irrational numbers, and even Wilson’s... (more) |
|
|
The Book of Sand (1975) |
|
| Jorge Luis Borges |
|
"The line is made up of an infinite number of points;
the plane of an infinite number of lines;
the volume of an infinite number of planes;
the hypervolume of an infinite number of volumes.
.... (more) |
|
|
The Book of Worlds (1929) |
|
| Miles J. Breuer |
|
Another story of 4-D from Miles Breuer, this time with Prof. Cosgrave who builds a "hyper-stereoscope" that can combine 3-dimensional views ("geometrical stereograms") from different angles into a 4-D... (more) |
|
|
Border Guards (1999) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
In a virtual universe shaped like a 3-torus, free from disease and death, Jamil is easily depressed but enjoys playing a game of quantum soccer with his old friends, and one new friend. The new friend... (more) |
|
|
Borzag and the Numerical Apocalypse (2006) |
|
| Jason Earls |
|
I must warn you that I am a trained mathematician, but NOT a trained expert on literature. Among other consequences, this means that I sometimes have trouble telling the difference between brilliant,... (more) |
|
|
The Boy Who Reversed Himself (1986) |
|
| William Sleator |
|
[William Sleator's The Boy Who
Reversed Himself is] a book catering to a preteen or early teen
audience about three high school students' adventures in 4-dimensional (and
higher) space. It includes... (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) |
|
|
Brain Wave (1954) |
|
| Poul Anderson |
|
This debut novel from SF superstar Anderson explains that the human
intelligence is far more powerful than we have thus far seen. In fact,
once we escape from the effects of a force field that is limiting... (more) |
|
|
Brave New World (1932) |
|
| Aldous Huxley |
|
"Best known for its horrifying utopian vision of a future
where children are manufactured for their role in society,
the masses are kept happy with their feelies and drugs,
... (more) |
|
|
Brazzaville Beach (1990) |
|
| William Boyd |
|
Main character is a women studying chimpanzees in Africa, but her
ex-husband is a set theorist who goes mad because he fails to prove a
theorem.
One of my favourite authors, and one of his best... (more) |
|
|
Breaking the Code (1986) |
|
| Hugh Whitemore (playwright) |
|
This biography of Alan Turing is a "character study" of this
fascinating mathematician. Although we do see some mathematics (including
an especially nice description of Gödel's Theorem and its mathematical
significance)... (more) |
|
|
The Brink of Infinity (1936) |
|
| Stanley G. Weinbaum |
|
A
mathematics professor is kidnapped by a madman with a grudge against
mathematicians, who threatens dire consequences unless the prof can
solve a math riddle he has concocted: by asking ten questions,... (more) |
|
|
The Brothers Karamazov (1880) |
|
| Fyodor Dostoevsky |
|
In this classic final masterwork by Dostoevsky, the existence of non-Euclidean geometry is mentioned at one point. Although the theme is not explicitly carried throughout the rest of the novel, it plays... (more) |
|
|
The Butterfly Effect (2001) |
|
| D.F. Roberts |
|
Only available for Kindle download as far as I can tell, this sexually explicit novel follows Dr. Martin Crowe as he ``uses chaos math'' (sounds unlikely!) to solve unusual problems for people, such as his ex-lover who is now being blackmailed by her ex-husband.
--Suggested for inclusion by Vijay Fafat. (more) |
|
|
A Calculated Demise (2007) |
|
| Robert Spiller |
|
A high school math teacher, Bonnie Pinkwater, solves the mystery surrounding the murder of a PE teacher, a student, and the family of the boy suspected in the killing.
This sequel to The Witch of Agnesi... (more) |
|
|
Calculated Magic (1995) |
|
| Robert Weinberg |
|
In this sequel to A Logical Magician, the mathematically trained wizard's assistant returns to fight evil monsters in Vegas and save his fiance (Merlin's daughter) from Hell.
I do like the idea that... (more) |
|
|
Calculating God (2000) |
|
| Robert J. Sawyer |
|
Though it is considerably less mathematical than Factoring Humanity, it holds together a bit better as a novel. Here, we encounter aliens who view the existence of god (a creator of the universe) as a... (more) |
|
|
Calculus (Newton's Whores) (2004) |
|
| Carl Djerassi |
|
The credit for the invention of calculus has long been contested, being claimed by both Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. A committee established by the Royal Society in 1712 concluded that Newton was... (more) |
|
|
Calculus and Pizza (2003) |
|
| Clifford Pickover |
|
A pizza chef teaches calculus to his restaurant patrons. Romance and hilarity ensue.
(more) |
|
|
Calculus of Murder (1986) |
|
| Erik Rosenthal |
|
"The hero is a part-time instructor and
researcher at Berkeley and moonlights as a PI. He solves his cases
using calculus. The narrative is excellent, humorous, and believable."
Actually, I just... (more) |
|
|
The Call of Cthulhu (1928) |
|
| H.P. Lovecraft |
|
This is the most famous story by Lovecraft, which spawned it's own sub-genre and
RPG,
called the Cthulhu Mythos. It concerns the investigations of Prof. Francis
Wayland Thurston
as he investigates... (more) |
|
|
The Cambist and Lord Iron (2007) |
|
| Daniel Abraham |
|
The story is set in a no-name kingdom, seemingly medieval but with
certain modernisms. The cambist of the title is a minor worker, whose
daily routine is interrupted by Lord Iron, who has come to... (more) |
|
|
The Cambridge Quintet (1999) |
|
| John L. Casti |
|
A group of famous historical figures, including Wittegenstein,
Schrödinger, J.B.S. Haldane, and Alan Turing meet at the home of
C.P. Snow to discuss the question of whether machines can think.
John... (more) |
|
|
The Cambridge Theorem (1990) |
|
| Tony Cape |
|
It is a British-Russian spy novel in the style of Le Carre that is set in Cambridge, UK. If you like that sort of thing, fine. It is true that the murdered genius is a math graduate student, and he leaves... (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 Captured Cross-Section (1929) |
|
| Miles J. Breuer (M.D.) |
|
Another "extra dimensions" story, with the twist of our hero having to save his fiance (also a mathematician) from terrifying dangers. There is some nonsense at the beginning about rotations and a count of variables/equations that probably had its basis in a reasonable linear algebra class but just comes out sounding kind of silly here. (more) |
|
|
Cardano and the Case of the Cubic (2005) |
|
| Jeff Adams |
|
This parody of early 20th century "Hard Boiled Private Detective" novels is instead a short story about 16th century mathematician Gerolamo Cardano.
Its opening paragraphs clearly set the tone:
It... (more) |
|
|
Carry On, Mr. Bowditch (1955) |
|
| Jean Lee Latham |
|
The life of early American mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch, famous for his work on techniques of navigation, is fictionalized in this novel for young adults. Although the mathematical details are not... (more) |
|
|
Cascade Point (1983) |
|
| Timothy Zahn |
|
"Cascade Point" by Timothy Zahn (1983, won the 1984 Hugo award) contains
fictionalized mathematical analysis of higher-order dimensions of
space/time.
The novel concerns future space travel whereby... (more) |
|
|
Case of Lies (2005) |
|
| Perri O'Shaughnessy |
|
An old, unsolved casino murder becomes mathematical when three of the witnesses turn out to have been math students using their skills to win at gambling. Quite a bit of detailed discussion of number... (more) |
|
|
The Case of the Murdered Mathematician (2001) |
|
| Julia Barnes / Kathy Ivey |
|
This story is actually a fictionalized account of the "Murder Mystery" game
played by the MAA Student Mathematics Club at Western Carolina University.
Clues provide insight into possible motivations... (more) |
|
|
The Cat in Numberland (2006) |
|
| Ivar Ekeland (author) / John O'Brien (illustrator) |
|
This picture book uses the idea of a hotel with infintely many rooms for introducing some advanced concepts about numbers and infinity to children. The hotel, run in the book by "Mr. and Mrs. Hilbert",... (more) |
|
|
The Catalyst (1991) |
|
| Desmond Cory |
|
Mathematics professor John Dobie gets caught up in a truly mind-boggling
mystery when one of his former students, his wife's best friend, and then
his own wife wind up dead, and the police consider him... (more) |
|
|
A Catastrophe Machine (2004) |
|
| Charles Scholz |
|
A well-written, vaguely surrealistic story loosely based on the real mathematical field of catastrophe theory and set within the context of the Vietnam War.
The title is taken from an invention of mathematician... (more) |
|
|
Catching Genius (2007) |
|
| Kristy Kiernan |
|
A novel about a pair of sisters, one of whom is a "math genius". The title refers to the fact that she thinks "eyecue" is a disease when she first hears as a child that she has a high one and warns her... (more) |
|
|
Cálculo Infinitesimal de una variable
(1994) |
|
| Juan de Burgos Román |
|
Apparently, this Spanish calculus textbook begins each chapter with a "tale". I have not yet had a chance to see the book myself, and so I cannot say for certain whether these really are "fiction" or... (more) |
|
|
Cálculo Infinitesimal de varias variables
(1995) |
|
| Juan de Burgos Román |
|
Apparently, this Spanish calculus textbook begins each chapter with a "tale". I have not yet had a chance to see the book myself, and so I cannot say for certain whether these really are "fiction" or... (more) |
|
|
The Center of the Universe (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
This short story was intended to serve two different purposes. On the one hand it is a glimpse into the lives and interactions of mathematics graduate students. And, on the other, it addresses the philosophical... (more) |
|
|
A Certain Ambiguity: A Mathematical Novel (2007) |
|
| Gaurav Suri / Hartosh Singh Bal |
|
The intertwined stories of Ravi, a Stanford student taking a course on "Infinity" in the 1980's, and his grandfather who was jailed for blasphemy in New Jersey in 1919 constitute a philosophical investigation... (more) |
|
|
The Chair of Philanthromathematics (1908) |
|
| O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) |
|
Jeff Peters and Andy Tucker, con men in
the O. Henry stories collected in this volume, are a bit
uncomfortable after scoring a really big scam. So they
... (more) |
|
|
Chaos in Wonderland: Visual Adventures in a Fractal World (1995) |
|
| Clifford Pickover |
|
Devoted to a society of mathematicians living in a subterranean chamber of Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter. Status in their societies is determined by the beauty of their fractal dreams. Fractal weapons, chaos theory, the Lyapunov exponent, and strange attractors are featured.
(more) |
|
|
Children of Dune (1976) |
|
| Frank Herbert |
|
This third novel in the "Dune" series (which was also made into a TV miniseries) contains a wonderful (but rather brief and not very significant) bit of fictional mathematics. The following quotation... (more) |
|
|
Child's Play (1986) |
|
| Isaac Asimov |
|
Young Griswold uses something he just learned
in elementary school math class to solve a minor stumper. (Be
warned: the problem has a minor bug. Change "mix" to "nix".)
Published in the... (more) |
|
|
The Chimera Prophesies (2007) |
|
| Elliott Ostler |
|
A mathematician known only as ``#6'', while trying to come up with a model that would predict probabilities for different human behaviors, finds that in fact he can very nearly predict the future with... (more) |
|
|
The Circle of Zero (1936) |
|
| Stanley G. Weinbaum |
|
Thanks to Vijay Fafat for pointing out this story (with only a little math in it). A character speculates that the laws of probability predict that anything will happen in an infinite amount of time,... (more) |
|
|
City of Infinite Bridges (2007) |
|
| Alex Rose |
|
A very short, definitely fictional but delightful little tale about Katharina Gsell, Euler’s wife. In this fictional account, Katharina is supposed to have displayed a graph of the 7 Konigsberg bridges... (more) |
|
|
Cliff Walk (1987) |
|
| Margaret Dickson |
|
This novel which alternates between being a melancholy character study and thriller, tells the story of a woman named Crelly, from her childhood in a family torn apart by abuse and tragedy, to the separation... (more) |
|
|
Coconuts (1926) |
|
| Ben Ames Williams |
|
The story is a very nicely written tale of one man, Wadlin, whose only passion in life is mathematics - numbers, puzzles, Diophantine equations ("indeterminates"), statistics. As the author describes... (more) |
|
|
Cocoon of Terror (2008) |
|
| Jason Earls |
|
The protagonist in the latest novel by Jason Earls spends his time hunting down the evil and semi-mystical artist Zelian, and much of his spare time finding integers with interesting aesthetic and number... (more) |
|
|
Code to Zero (2000) |
|
| Ken Follett |
|
This thriller is set in 1958, with backdrop the first successful launching
of a US satellite. Several of the characters are mathematicians turned
rocket scientists. They frequently muse rather explicitly... (more) |
|
|
The Cold Equations (1954) |
|
| Tom Godwin |
|
This classic science fiction story is a favorite of English teachers
because, even after all of these years, it has the ability to get the
attention of and provoke discussion amongst otherwise apathetic... (more) |
|
|
The Company of Strangers (2001) |
|
| Robert Wilson |
|
A bittersweet romance/thriller about a young woman mathematician in
Portugal spying for the British during World War II. There is a lot of
interesting stuff in this novel if you're looking at the romance... (more) |
|
|
Comrades in Miami (2005) |
|
| Jose Latour |
|
Colonel Victoria Valiente is an important figure in the Communist party of Cuba. However, her husband is a famous mathematician, Manuel Pardo. Manuel's job allows him to travel widely and he becomes... (more) |
|
|
Conceiving Ada (1997) |
|
| Lynn Hershman-Leeson
|
|
Bizarre, low-budget film in which a female computer programmer from the 20th century accesses the memories of Ada Lovelace, the 19th century mathematician and daughter of the poet Lord Byron. The film... (more) |
|
|
Confusions of Young Torless (1906) |
|
| Robert Musil |
|
A semi-autobiographical novel set in a military
academy in a desolate corner of the Austro-Hungarian empire, is the
story of the intellectual awakening of an intelligent adolescent, and
contains several... (more) |
|
|
Conjure Wife (Dark Ladies) (1953) |
|
| Fritz Leiber |
|
Norman Saylor, a professor of anthropology/sociology, discovers his wife has been practicing magic for years, and that their
house is loaded with charms. Annoyed at her secret superstitious bent, he... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Constans (The Constant Factor) (1980) |
|
| Krzysztof Zanussi |
|
In this film Witold, a Polish man who believes that he can explain all of life's mysteries and solve all of life's problems with mathematics, learns otherwise. (more) |
|
|
Contact (1985) |
|
| Carl Sagan |
|
This is a fantastic novel; don't skip it just because you saw the
movie. Mathematics plays an important role in the book, much more so
than in the film. In both, Ellie Arroway detects a message from... (more) |
|
|
Conte d'ete (1996) |
|
| Eric Rohmer |
|
With a title that can be translated as "A Summer's Tale", this is the third film in Rohmer's "seasons" series, preceeded by tales of
spring and winter and followed by a tale of autumn in 1998. In this... (more) |
|
|
Context (2005) |
|
| John Meaney |
|
This is the second book in the Nulapeiron Sequence by John Meaney. The protagonist is still Tom Corcorigan, who in the first novel rose from slavery to royalty in part because of his "logosophical" (read... (more) |
|
|
Continuums (2008) |
|
| Robert Carr |
|
The decisions we make and the difficulty in accepting the consequences is the main focus of this book about a Romanian mathematician who leaves her country and her daughter to be in a place that she could... (more) |
|
|
Convergent Series (1979) |
|
| Larry Niven |
|
According to
the liner notes, Niven received an undergraduate degree in
mathematics. Mostly the degree has only apparently inspired his
titles (note also the book called "The Integral Trees") without
noticeably... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Counting on Frank (1990) |
|
| Rod Clement |
|
Lots of people seem to really like this
children's picture book about a boy who likes to ask (and answer) questions
like: "How long would it take to fill up the room with water if I left the
bathtub... (more) |
|
|
Coyote Moon (2003) |
|
| John A. Miller |
|
Well, this book is hard to describe! It's certainly different and not easily categorizable. It is a novel that addresses the question "What if a young, nerdy, MIT mathematics professor died of cancer... (more) |
|
|
The Crime of the Mathematics Professor (1960) |
|
| Clarice Lispector |
|
There is very little mathematical content to this story of a math professor attempting to atone for having abandoned a pet dog. He is described (in the English translation) as having a "cold, mathematical... (more) |
|
|
Crimes and Math Demeanors (2007) |
|
| Leith Hathout |
|
The short mysteries in this book remind me of "Encyclopedia Brown". After a brief description of a sometimes contrived dilemma facing our young detective -- 14 year old Ravi -- you are given an opportunity... (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) |
|
|
Cryptonomicon (1998) |
|
| Neal Stephenson |
|
This "cult" novel of mathematics, computer science, espionage and
warfare follows a mathematician through World War II and his grandson
through the creation of a (less than ordinary) silicon valley start-up
company.... (more) |
|
|
Cube (1997) |
|
| Vincenzo Natali (Director) |
|
This [film] concerns the attempt of six individuals to escape from a vast network
of interlocking cubes, each room, and each wall, floor and ceiling
identical. The rooms vary in colour. Some are harmless;... (more) |
|
|
The Cube Root of Conquest (1948) |
|
| Rog Phillips |
|
An evil dictator's plan to destroy and conquer the world is based on the
work of one of his scientists, which allows travel into complex components
of time. In order to do this, one is required to solve... (more) |
|
|
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003) |
|
| Mark Haddon |
|
This book is a delightful read. You won't want to put it down. It is
like nothing you have ever read. A murder mystery where the victim
is a dog. A lead character with autism that is passionate... (more) |
|
|
The Curve of the Snowflake (1956) |
|
| William Grey Walter |
|
A beautiful and brilliant woman organizes a team of scientists (and a mathematician) who together make fusion energy efficient and invent a flying submarine...and perhaps a time-machine as well. When... (more) |
|
|
Cyberchase (2002) |
|
| Educational Broadcasting Corporation |
|
Three kids go inside "cyberspace" to help the maternal Mother Board
fight the evil Hacker. Each episode, in addition to learning about
computers, the kids have to develop their mathematical skills to... (more) |
|
|
The Cyberiad (1967) |
|
| Stanislaw Lem |
|
I was perusing your site and I happened to think of a great addition to your list. It's by Polish philosopher Stanislaw Lem and called "The Cyberiad". It's about the adventures of two super "inventors"... (more) |
|
|
The Da Vinci Code (2003) |
|
| Dan Brown |
|
The last act of a dying curator at the Louvre is an attempt to pass on, in code, a secret that he did not want to take to the grave. Among the things needed to "decode" this secret message is a recognition... (more) |
|
|
The Dangerous Dimension (1938) |
|
| L. Ron Hubbard |
|
"The Dangerous Dimension" is L. Ron Hubbard's first science
fiction story, written at editor F Orlin Tremaine's request
for something light, easy-reading, and humorous. In the
story, Professor Henry... (more) |
|
|
Dante Dreams (1998) |
|
| Stephen Baxter |
|
There is an interpretation of Dante's "Divine Comedy" as a mystical description of the universe as a hypersphere (see "Dante and the 3-sphere"
American Journal of Physics -- December 1979 -- Volume... (more) |
|
|
Dark as Day (2002) |
|
| Charles Sheffield |
|
Alex Ligon, though unbelievably rich, chooses to work voluntarily at a government
agency where his predictive models for the future of the human race (based,
he claims, on the principles of statistical... (more) |
|
|
Dark Integers (2007) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
The ``cold war'' between this universe with our mathematical laws and a bordering universe with different ones (which began in "Luminous") heats up when the numerical experiments of a mathematical physicist... (more) |
|
|
The Dark Lord (2005) |
|
| Patricia Simpson |
|
This fantasy/horror/romance novel features as its protagonist a young, female math professor at UC-Berkeley who gets caught up in a battle with a demon when she finds an unusual deck of tarot cards in... (more) |
|
|
The Dark Side of the Sun (1976) |
|
| Terry Pratchett |
|
This humorous science fiction novel tells the tale of Dom Salabos, who believes he is destined to become "Chairman of the Board of Widdershins and heir to riches untold", but his allies familiar with p-math... (more) |
|
|
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) |
|
| Robert Wise (director) / Harry Bates (story) /
Edmund H. North |
|
One must wonder how aliens might communicate with humans when and if they arrive on Earth. In the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, the extraterrestrial Klaatu (Michael Rennie) introduces himself... (more) |
|
|
De Impossibilitate Vitae and Prognoscendi (1971) |
|
| Stanislaw Lem |
|
This is a philosophical discourse (intended as a parody, but I swear
I've read serious papers that were very much like it) in which the
author argues that probablity theory makes no sense since it is... (more) |
|
|
A Deadly Medley of Smedley (2003) |
|
| Feargus Gwynplaine MacIntyre |
|
Paradox Patrol officer Julie Anne Callender, with the help of her brother
Gregorian and her uncle Newgate, track down yet again the timecrime master
of evil Smedley Faversham (and atrocious punmeister)... (more) |
|
|
Dear Abbey (2003) |
|
| Terry Bisson |
|
This novel, which has not received many good reviews and appears only to have been published in Britain, involves a math professor who is a terrorist for environmentalist causes. (That the author chose... (more) |
|
|
Death and the Compass (La Muerte y La Brujula) (1968) |
|
| Jorge Luis Borges |
|
This is considered one of Borges' greatest short stories, and was even made into a film by "RepoMan director Alex Cox. The following review from Alejandro Satz explains the mathematical content, but also... (more) |
|
|
Death of a Doxy (1966) |
|
| Rex Stout |
|
The murder victim's brother-in-law is a high school math
teacher. Nero Wolfe believes this to be relevant at one
point, even quoting some mathematical history from an
encyclopedia.
I... (more) |
|
|
The Death of Archimedes (1949) |
|
| Karel Capek |
|
As history usually tells the story, Archimedes is killed by a Roman
soldier who did not realize who he was. In this version, however, the
centurion is well aware of who he is speaking with. While he... (more) |
|
|
Death Qualified: A Mystery of Chaos (1992) |
|
| Kate Willhelm |
|
The book only becomes science fiction towards the end. For most of it, it follows the format of a mystery in which there are several murders (which remain mysterious to the reader until near to the end)... (more) |
|
|
Deception (2003) |
|
| Eric Altman |
|
The differential geometer who has discovered a formula for the lifetime of tiny black holes is the only decent character in this book. That is not to say that the others are poorly written, just that... (more) |
|
|
Delicious Rivers (2006) |
|
| Ellen Maddow |
|
This collage of absurd and entertaining scenes at a NYC post office (and the music and choreography to which they are performed) were all inspired by the mathematics of Penrose Tilings. In particular,... (more) |
|
|
A Deprogrammer's Tale (2000) |
|
| Colin Adams |
|
This spoof presents the attempts of math professors to convince students to become math majors and the subsequent interest of those students in math as if it were a religious cult. Told from the point... (more) |
|
|
Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World (1666) |
|
| Margaret Cavendish |
|
Although there is only a short discussion of mathematics, I had to include it because it is just too interesting that this is not only one of the oldest science-fiction stories but moreover the fact that... (more) |
|
|
The Devil a Mathematician Would Be (1962) |
|
| A.J. Lohwater |
|
This clever short story that captures the feeling of a math problem that "gets under your skin" was printed in
The Mathematical Magpie
and was said to have been "collected" by A.J. Lohwater. Well, I... (more) |
|
|
The Devil and Simon Flagg (1954) |
|
| Arthur Porges |
|
Mathematicians know the feeling of trying to prove something you
really believe to be true, but has never been proven. There is
pleasure in doing this, like solving a puzzle, but also frustration
and... (more) |
|
|
The Devil and the Lady (1930) |
|
| Alfred Tennyson |
|
Although first published in 1930, this humorous and beautifully worded play was written by the famous poet more than 100 years earlier when he was less than 14 years old. One character is a mathematician... (more) |
|
|
The Devil You Don't (1970) |
|
| Keith Laumer |
|
The devil (who is not such a bad guy after all) seeks help from a quantum physics expert to fight off some aliens (who are not so evil either) that happen to disrupt the "Randomness Field". This disruption... (more) |
|
|
The Devouring Tide (1944) |
|
| John Russell Fearn (under the pseudonym Polton Cross) |
|
Another horridly written story by JRF, this time about an all-consuming, universe-destroying frontier of “non-spacetime” dubbed “Black Infinity”, a shock wave from the original big bang which... (more) |
|
|
Diamond Dogs (2001) |
|
| Alistair Reynolds |
|
This novella by a trained astrophysicist who has worked for the European Space Agency features an alien designed "death trap" that challenges people with difficult mathematical puzzles. In an interview,... (more) |
|
|
Diary of a Bad Year (2007) |
|
| John Maxwell Coetzee |
|
J.M. Coetzee has a Nobel Prize in literature (2003) and an undergraduate degree in mathematics (University of Cape Town, 1961). It is therefore not too surprising to find him included in my list of mathematical... (more) |
|
|
Diaspora (1998) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
"This is the only science-fiction book I have ever
read to define the term fiber bundle."
said contributor David Moews of this book. The same for me, though I was
disappointed to see that it was... (more) |
|
|
The Difference Engine (1991) |
|
| William Gibson / Bruce Sterling |
|
Two of the innovators of the cyberpunk novel -- famous for showing how messed up the future will be because of technology -- turn everything around and show us instead how great the past would have been... (more) |
|
|
Digital Fortress (1996) |
|
| Dan Brown |
|
In a final act of defiance, a young Japanese genius threatens to make
public his "unbreakable code" if the NSA does not confess that it has been
reading even encrypted e-mails. The heroine of the story... (more) |
|
|
Dirac (2006) |
|
| Dietmar Dath |
|
The protagonist tries to write a novel
about the mathematician and physicist Paul Dirac. Excerpts from
Dirac's works and Geoffrey A. Landis' novel "Ripples in the Dirac
Sea" are implemented in the plot, so you can learn a lot about
mathematics and quantum physics.
(As far as I know, this novel is currently only available in the original German. Please correct me if I'm wrong.) (more) |
|
|
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) |
|
| Douglas Adams |
|
Douglas Adams is best known for his wacky Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy series. But his two Dirk Gently novels, while
maintaining Adams' characteristic high wackiness, also carry
... (more) |
|
|
A Disappearing Number (2007) |
|
| Simon McBurney |
|
One of the storylines of McBurney's A Disappearing Number written for his experimental theater troupe, "Complicite", concerns Srinivasa Ramanujan's collaboration with G.H. Hardy. Another focuses on a modern... (more) |
|
|
The Discovery of Heaven (1992) |
|
| Harry Mulisch |
|
This novel is considered to be the magnum opus of one of the
greats of Dutch postwar literature. (Original Dutch title _De Ontdekking van de Hemel_,
English translation 1996, film version in 2001)
_The... (more) |
|
|
The Disposessed (1974) |
|
| Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
A utopian novel in which theories of time in mathematical physics ("chronotopology", "sequency and simultaneity", "general temporal theories") play an important role.
I have not yet read this book,... (more) |
|
|
Distress (1995) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
My friends and I are all in agreement on this one: this book starts
out great (at a mathematical physics conference where people are
talking about the latest theories of quantum gravity) but then it
degenerates... (more) |
|
|
Divergence (2007) |
|
| Tony Ballantyne |
|
This is the third novel of a trilogy that began with RECURSION and
CAPACITY. Set in the 23rd century, the nannying of humanity by
government and computers is the cause of some discomfort and rebellion.
Along... (more) |
|
|
Division by Zero (1991) |
|
| Ted Chiang |
|
Answers the question: what would happen if we found out that
mathematics is inconsistent? This is a great piece of
mathematical fiction. (Thanks to Frank Chess who pointed it out to
me.)
Renee... (more) |
|
|
Do the Math #2: The Writing on the Wall (2008) |
|
| Wendy Lichtman |
|
In this sequel to Do the Math: Secrets, Lies and Algebra, a middle school student who likes to think of things in terms of mathematical notation (for example, calling her friend Miranda "|m|" because she... (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) |
|
|
Do the Math: Secrets, Lies, and Algebra (2007) |
|
| Wendy Lichtman |
|
A math-loving eighth grader applies mathematical concepts to problems in her social life.
According to the book jacket, the author has a degree in mathematics and writes pieces for many periodicals.... (more) |
|
|
The Dobie Paradox (1993) |
|
| Desmond Cory |
|
Another Professor Dobie mystery (see also The
Catalyst and The Mask of Zeus) in which the so-called "Columbo with a chair in mathematics" solves the mystery of the murder of a young girl. There is less... (more) |
|
|
Doctor Who (Episode: Logopolis) (1981) |
|
| Christopher Bidmead |
|
This famous "last Tom Baker" episode of the popular
BBC show "Doctor Who" involves a city of whispering mathematicians
whose computations keep the universe running smoothly.
"The next broadcast story... (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 dimension. These... (more) |
|
|
Doing our Babbage (1992) |
|
| Ira Slobodien |
|
Seeking assistance: I have not been able to obtain any information about this 1992 book, but its title and its category listings suggest that it may be ``mathematical fiction''. Has anyone out there read it? (more) |
|
|
Donald in Mathmagic Land (1959) |
|
| Hamilton Luske (director) |
|
Disney's Donald Duck takes an adventure to a land where mathematics
"comes alive". (Animated short.)
I used this video in my 6th grade
classroom. The kids enjoyed watching
... (more) |
|
|
The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics (1963) |
|
| Norton Juster |
|
This picture book describes the love story of two geometrical
figures. It was also made into a cartoon by Chuck Jones (available on YouTube).
I have loved this book ever since my wonderful
mathematical... (more) |
|
|
Dragon's Egg (1980) |
|
| Robert L. Forward |
|
[In this science fiction novel],
the crew of the first spaceship to ever visit a neutron star discover that the star is inhabited by a race - the Cheela - whose metabolism is based on nuclear reactions... (more) |
|
|
The Dreams in the Witch-House (1933) |
|
| H.P. Lovecraft |
|
In this story, Walter Gilman, a mathematics graduate student at Miskatonic
University
in Arkham, Mass, rents a room in the famed haunted "Witch House" of Keziah
Mason,
a witch who legend says escaped... (more) |
|
|
Drode's Equations (1981) |
|
| Richard Grant |
|
When this story takes place, the fictional "Drode's Equations" have been
lost for so long that they have become practically mythological. And so
the historian protagonist is surprised to find them in... (more) |
|
|
Drunkard's Walk (1960) |
|
| Frederik Pohl |
|
A number theorist is suffering from frequent and
inexplicable suicide attempts, the latest victim of a small epidemic among
academia. In between lectures on Pascal's triangle and the binomial
theorem... (more) |
|
|
Dude, can you count? (2010) |
|
| Christian Constanda |
|
Utilizing the entertaining contrivance of an extraterrestrial who visits human math conferences to evaluate our intelligence, Constanda tells us what he thinks is wrong with math education today. Following... (more) |
|
|
D'Alembert's Principle: A Novel in Three Panels (2000) |
|
| Andrew Crumey |
|
A fictionalized presentation of the life (and love) of Jean le Rond
D'Alembert (1717-1783), best known -- to me at least -- as the first
to study and solve the famous linear wave equation u_xx + c u_tt = 0.
See the online
bookreview at at MAA Online. (more) |
|
|
Echoes from the Past (2006) |
|
| Edward Michel-Bird |
|
A young mathematics professor becomes involved in a mystery and a love affair when the identity of his true biological father is called into question. No mathematical ideas or results are discussed in... (more) |
|
|
Eifelheim (2006) |
|
| Michael Flynn |
|
In this award winning science fiction novel, Tom and Sharon have a lot in common. They share an apartment, both use sophisticated mathematics in their research, and both become completely obsessed with... (more) |
|
|
The Eight (1989) |
|
| Katherine Neville |
|
This book really is AMAZING. I have read it numerous times and it always gets better. Math plays an important part in this story and the connections made in the plot are fascinating. This book is an... (more) |
|
|
The Eighth Room (1989) |
|
| Stephen Baxter |
|
The story forms part of the Xeelee-sequence of stories and novels. In far distant future, the Xeelee decide to lock away the human race in a world hidden in hyperspace (as the pale, atavistic remnants... (more) |
|
|
The Einstein See-Saw (1932) |
|
| Miles J. Breuer |
|
This is another of the hyperspace stories by Miles Breuer. This time, a mathematical physicist discovers that mattter can be tossed around in and out of space(-time) [see his papers, "A Preliminary Report... (more) |
|
|
El matemático (1988) |
|
| Arturo Azuela |
|
It is a kind of bildungsroman narrated by a sexagenarian mathematician who makes a mathematical discovery in the verge of the year 2000. Of course, there is the detail of considering the year 2000 the... (more) |
|
|
Electric (2004) |
|
| Chad Taylor |
|
Three of the characters in this novel are mathematicians. Sam is a former statistician who now works at a successful Auckland data retrieval company. Because he is attracted to the hydrodynamic equations... (more) |
|
|
The Embalmer's Book of Recipes (2009) |
|
| Ann Lingard |
|
One of the three principle characters in this book is a mathematician who works on quasicrystals (and, like the other two main characters, she is also a dwarf). Aside from that, I'm afraid I know very... (more) |
|
|
Emmy Noether: The Mother of Modern Algebra (2008) |
|
| Margaret B.W. Tent |
|
A semi-fictional biography of Emmy Noether written for young adults. There is barely any mathematics discussed, but the book has received positive reviews from many mathematicians who hope (as, one supposes,... (more) |
|
|
Empire of the Ants (1991) |
|
| Bernard Werber |
|
This is a fascinating first novel. Published in France under the title "Les Fourmis" in 1991 and translated into English as "Empire of the Ants" (not to be confused with the H G Wells story
or movie... (more) |
|
|
En busca de Klingsor (In Search of Klingsor) (1999) |
|
| Jorge Volpi |
|
The story is highly mathematical, involving a German Character called Gustav
Links, though the main character is a young American physicist called Francis
Bacon (sounds good). The idea is that this... (more) |
|
|
The End of Mr. Y (2006) |
|
| Scarlett Thomas |
|
After her thesis advisor disappears, a graduate students studying "thought experiments" in science and in fiction discovers a copy of the rare (and supposedly cursed) book "The End of Mr. Y". Following... (more) |
|
|
Enigma (1995) |
|
| Robert Harris / Tom Stoppard |
|
In this this espionage story set in England's Bletchley Park at the height of the Second World War, Tom Jericho is a clever mathematician at the famous code breaking facility who -- either despite or because... (more) |
|
|
Eon (1985) |
|
| Greg Bear |
|
Its been quite a while since I read this, but some info is better than none!
Its rather like "Rama" - a big asteroid appears over the earth in the near future.
It was obviously made to be inhabited... (more) |
|
|
An Episode of Flatland (1907) |
|
| Charles H. Hinton |
|
Hinton, whose biography is a
little too weird for me to believe and whose essays on the fourth dimension
(see for example A New
Era of Thought) leave me wondering how much he really believed that the
fourth... (more) |
|
|
The Escher Twist (2002) |
|
| Jane Langton |
|
Part of the author's Homer/Mary Kelly series of mysteries based in
Concord MA. The plot centers on a crystallographer falling in love
with a stranger at an exhibit of Escher work, and... (more) |
|
|
The Eternal Wanderer (1936) |
|
| Nathan Schachner |
|
A magnificently pulpy story of one man, Cliff Haven’s, struggle against the tyranny of a Martian who enslaves the inner planets of the solar system. As a punishment, Cliff is sentenced to become “the... (more) |
|
|
The Ethical Equations (1945) |
|
| Murray Leinster |
|
Mathematics is invoked several times to formalize `what goes
round, comes around' as if it were a law of nature. 100% hokey.
The only thing worse than the bad math is the bad science.
... (more) |
|
|
Euclid Alone (1975) |
|
| William F. Orr |
|
An administrator in the math department of a major research institute
has to decide how to handle a paper which proves the inconsistency of
Euclidean geometry. (more) |
|
|
Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879) |
|
| Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) |
|
I have long known that mathematician Charles Dodgson, who wrote the famous Alice stories under the pseudonym "Lewis Carroll", also wrote a book defending Euclid's ancient text as the best for teaching... (more) |
|
|
Evariste and Heloise (2008) |
|
| Marco Abate |
|
This contribution to the collection The Shape of Content is difficult to classify. Combining fiction and fact, essay and comic book, fantasy and philosophy, it essentially takes the form of a proposal... (more) |
|
|
Evariste Galois (1965) |
|
| Alexadre Astruc (writer and director) |
|
Short film about the romantic and tragic death of Galois, the young mathematician whose research laid the foundation for Group Theory. I haven't actually seen the film, but the following quote (stolen... (more) |
|
|
The Exception (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
Written in the form of a dialogue between a man in a nursing home and his grandchild, this short story describes an undergraduate research project that produces a surprising answer to one of the most famous... (more) |
|
|
The Expert (1999) |
|
| Lee Gruenfeld |
|
A techno-legal thriller centered on a trial over cryptographic
exportation. The chip in question uses properties of large Mersenne
primes to provide an unbreakable code. This explanation seems to... (more) |
|
|
The Exploration of Space (1972) |
|
| Barrington J. Bayley |
|
The author has used - as in some of his other stories like "The problem of Morley's Emission" - a story format to lay out some of his philosophical speculations, in this instance about the nature of... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Eye of the Beholder (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
Shortly after a stunning success in her research, personal tragedy forces a math professor to change careers and begin work at the NSA where her work on cryptography involves some difficult ethical decisions.... (more) |
|
|
A Fable for Moderns (1955) |
|
| Lord Dunsany |
|
A bank employee becomes bored with the restrictions of arithmetic and decides to let his mathematical computations enjoy the freedom of "modern" poets and artists. Although he loses his job at the bank,... (more) |
|
|
Factoring Humanity (1998) |
|
| Robert J. Sawyer |
|
There is certainly a lot of deep mathematics discussed in this `first
contact' novel, as well as a good deal of controversial physics and
psychology. Still, in the end, I did not find it especially
satisfying.... (more) |
|
|
The Facts of Death (1998) |
|
| Raymond Benson |
|
Would you believe...James Bond battling a mathematical cult bent on world destruction? (It could happen.) In this latter day Bond novel, the villian is a dynamic leader of a cult who bases his teachings... (more) |
|
|
The Fairy Chessmen (1951) |
|
| Henry Kuttner |
|
A mathematician whose research involves a type of chess played with
variable rules ("fairy chess") is the only one able to solve an "equation
from the future" in which the constants are treated as variables... (more) |
|
|
|
|
The Fall of a Sparrow (1998) |
|
| Robert Hellenga |
|
In this novel, a man travels to Italy to testify at the trial of the terrorists who murdered his daughter in a 1980 train bombing. Florin Diacu, a mathematician who has written about chaos theory and... (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) |
|
|
False Witness (2007) |
|
| Randy D. Singer |
|
An espionage novel (with an embedded Christian religious message) about a mathematician's decryption algorithm with the potential to disrupt internet security.
(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 Fatal Equation (1933) |
|
| Arthur Strangeland |
|
This is a very well-crafted murder mystery executed quite ingeniously. A mathematical physicist - Jan Friede - sets up a system of 20+ equations which eliminate the time variable from Einstein's equations... (more) |
|
|
Fatous Staub (1991) |
|
| Christian Mähr |
|
This surrealistic science fiction novel about parallel worlds, computers, and the mathematics of Pierre Fatou (who laid the foundations for the theory of fractals) has appeared only in German. Since I... (more) |
|
|
The Favor (1994) |
|
| Donald Petrie (Director) / Sara Parriott (Writer) / Josann McGibbon (Writer) |
|
A romantic comedy in which a woman married to a math professor wonders what it would have been like to have been with her old boyfriend and so convinces her girlfriend to sleep with him and report back.... (more) |
|
|
Für immer in Honig (Forever in Honey) (2005) |
|
| Dietmar Dath |
|
Site visitor Hauke Reddman writes from Germany to tell me about this experimental German novel which includes diagrams from category theory. (For those who might not know, category theory is an abstract... (more) |
|
|
Fear of Math (1985) |
|
| Peter Cameron |
|
A feather-touch story about a young woman who comes to New York to do an MBA - and has to pass a Calculus course, a pre-requisite for an MBA. A brief description of how utterly lost she is after her... (more) |
|
|
The Feeling of Power (1957) |
|
| Isaac Asimov |
|
An advanced society rediscovers the joys
of multipying numbers BY HAND, a forgotten art. It's a
gem.
The
author probably did not realize how quickly the premise of this story
(people so dependent... (more) |
|
|
Feigenbaum Number (1995) |
|
| Nancy Kress |
|
A postdoc who perceives reality different than other people (he sees something like the Platonic ideals people ought to be) works with a professor on combining chaos theory with particle physics. I'm... (more) |
|
|
Fermat's Best Theorem (1995) |
|
| Janet Kagan |
|
A student comes up with what appears to be a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. So, she gives it to her professor hoping that he will find a mistake in it (see below). It turns out that the professor is... (more) |
|
|
Fermat's Lost Theorem (1994) |
|
| Jerry Oltion |
|
This is a neat little story which plays on the fancy that one has found a very simple proof for Fermat's last theorem...if only one can write it down before the epiphany passes. A young mathematician... (more) |
|
|
Fermat's Room (La Habitacion de Fermat) (2007) |
|
| Luis Piedrahita / Rodrigo Sopeña |
|
In this Spanish thriller, four mathematicians are invited to a booby trapped room where they must solve mathematical puzzles to prevent the walls from closing in and crushing them. This leaves them little... (more) |
|
|
The Fermata (1994) |
|
| Nicholson Baker |
|
This book is certainly more about sex than it is about mathematics. However, I find the one mathematical passage in it so hilarious that I have to include it here.
The premise of the book is that the... (more) |
|
|
Fermat's Last Tango (2000) |
|
| Joanne Sydney Lessner / Joshua Rosenblum |
|
Fermat's Last Tango is an intelligently written, hilarious fantasia
based on Andrew Wiles' 1993 proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. The main plot consists of a love triangle between Daniel
Keane... (more) |
|
|
The Fifth-Dimension Catapult (1931) |
|
| Murray Leinster |
|
This short novel, originally published in the January 1931 ASTOUNDING,
and republished by Damon Knight in SCIENCE FICTION OF THE 30'S (1975),
involves a mathematical physicist whose theories get applied... (more) |
|
|
Fifty Million Monkeys (1943) |
|
| Raymond F. Jones |
|
The story is set sometime around 12,000 AD. The use of interstellar rockets over 15 years creates a "polarization of space" which leads to a "Pioneer anomaly"-like deviations in flight paths of spacecraft.... (more) |
|
|
Fillet of Man (1995) |
|
| Eliot Fintushel |
|
A first contact short short. Prime numbers are the way humans
and the aliens recognize each other. And the alien spaceship
"looked like a topologist's diagram of an exploded torus".
Published in ASIMOV'S (Sept 95) pp112-115.
(more) |
|
|
The Finan-seer (1949) |
|
| Edward L. Locke |
|
This is a story about a Mathematics and an Economics professor who use game theory to beat the stock market. The university's endowment fund, having lost significant amounts in the market, is desperate... (more) |
|
|
The First Circle (1968) |
|
| Alexandr Solzhenitsyn |
|
Solzhenitsyn had been a math major until Hitler and Stalin came up
with a different career path for him, and TFC is based on his own
brief stay in the luxury side of the Gulag, which he claims saved
his... (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) |
|
|
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884) |
|
| Edwin Abbott Abbott |
|
This is the classic example of mathematical fiction in which
the author helps us to think about the meaning of "dimension" through
fictional example: a visit to a world with only two spatial
dimensions.... (more) |
|
|
Flatterland: like Flatland, only more so (2001) |
|
| Ian Stewart |
|
In this "sequel" to Flatland, popular
mathematics writer Ian Stewart lets us accompany the granddaugther of the
original "A. Square" who starred in original classic, as she learns about
fractal dimensions,... (more) |
|
|
The Flight of the Dragonfly (aka Rocheworld) (1984) |
|
| Robert L. Forward |
|
A crew of humans travel to a distant planet to meet the intelligent
lifeform we have discovered there. They turn out to be a race largely
interested in mathematical problems (sounds very reasonable... (more) |
|
|
Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria (2009) |
|
| Ki Longfellow |
|
Another novel about the historical figure Hypatia of Alexandria whose murder by Christian zealots as the Ancient Greek culture faded away makes her a good subject for authors with certain political and... (more) |
|
|
Flowers Stained with Moonlight (2005) |
|
| Catherine Shaw |
|
In this sequel to The Three-Body Problem, Vanessa Duncan is called upon to save an innocent young woman, falsely suspected of murdering her older and unlikable husband. Although there is no mathematics... (more) |
|
|
Forbidden Knowledge (1987) |
|
| Kathryn Cramer |
|
Mathematical statements can sound pretty strange, practically humorous, when you don't know the technical definitions of the terms. This somewhat frightening story has such a statement as its punchline.... (more) |
|
|
Forever Changes (2008) |
|
| Brendan Halpin |
|
A very somber novel written for young adults about a mathematically talented teenager with cystic fibrosis. Her math teacher helps comfort her by making an analogy between the important role of the infinitesimals in calculus and the importance of even a short life. (more) |
|
|
|
|
Foundation (1951) |
|
| Isaac Asimov |
|
In this book and its prequels/sequels, we see humanity guided by the
work of fictional "mathematician, Hari Seldon, who works out the rules
of psychohistory and makes a secret chart that the humankind... (more) |
|
|
Four Brands of Impossible (1964) |
|
| Norman Kagan |
|
In the futuristic 1980's, a math student graduates from multiversity and gets a job with a megacorporation which is trying to do the impossible, literally. Along with his friends (a psychologist and an... (more) |
|
|
The Four-Color Problem (1971) |
|
| Barrington J. Bayley |
|
A story written in a psychedelic, stream-of-consciousness style a la William S. Burroughs concerning the discovery of previously unknown countries on the Earth whose existence provides a counter-example... (more) |
|
|
The Fourth Dynasty (1936) |
|
| R.R. Winterbotham |
|
A confused story of a couple (Victor and Georgiana) who go into
cryogenic suspended animation for a million and a half years and wake
up in the era of the Fourth Dynasty, the age of the Kora (first... (more) |
|
|
The Fourth-Dimensional Demonstrator (1935) |
|
| Murray Leinster |
|
Uses the fourth dimension as geewhiz terminology to explain
a matter duplicator/unduplicator. Includes a tesseract.
But if you ignore the story's explanation involving time as
... (more) |
|
|
Fractal Mode (1992) |
|
| Piers Anthony |
|
Here, Anthony's usual blend of fantasy and science fiction takes us to an alternate universe where the geometry of worlds themselves take on the form of the Mandelbrot set. Unfortunately, he spends a... (more) |
|
|
The Fractal Murders (2001) |
|
| Mark Cohen |
|
In this award winning (Top Ten Mysteries on the Book Sense 76 Fall List for 2002) mystery novel "Hard-Boiled" Detective Pepper Keane is hired by a tall and attractive math professor (with whom he of course... (more) |
|
|
The Franklin's Tale (in The Canterbury Tales) (1390) |
|
| Geoffrey Chaucer |
|
Aurelius of Brittany greatly desires Dorigen, a married woman who has
not seen her husband, the knight, for some years. Dorigen puts off
Aurelius's advances by promising that she will yield when he... (more) |
|
|
The French Mathematician (1998) |
|
| Tom Petsinis |
|
A fictionalized account (in first person) of the life and untimely
death of Evariste Galois, originator of the mathematical subject now
known as group theory.
This is a story about a mathematician,... (more) |
|
|
The Fringe (Episode: The Equation) (2008) |
|
| J.R. Orci (Screenplay) / David H. Goodman (Screenplay) |
|
The ``Fringe Team'' (an FBI agent, a mad scientist and his son) investigate a series of kidnappings in which the victim is hypnotized with red and green lights. In each case, the victim was about to... (more) |
|
|
Frobenius: A Sesquilogue (1996) |
|
| Lee Rudolph |
|
A fictionalized account of the life of Hamilton as remembered by
Frobenius (in verse). (A slightly different version was published in
the Mathematical Intelligencer.)
(more) |
|
|
Futurama (1999) |
|
| David S. Cohen (David X. Cohen) / Ken Keeler / Jeff Westbrook |
|
Another Matt Groening cartoon TV show (like the Simpsons) that includes many mathematical "in jokes". The website simpsonsmath.com/futuramamath includes discussion of these jokes and the mathematical... (more) |
|
|
The Future Engine (1995) |
|
| Byron Tetrick |
|
Charles Babbage's son calls on Sherlock Holmes to investigate the
theft of the Analytic Engine from its warehouse. The son gives a
description of its importance to mathematical calculations. But
it's his mention of the role of the binomial theorem in its working
that arouses Holmes's interest.
Published in Mike Resnick and M H Greenberg (eds) SHERLOCK HOLMES IN ORBIT.
(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) |
|
|
Gödel's Doom (1985) |
|
| George Zebrowski |
|
What if Gödel was wrong? That is the question asked in this well
written but very confused short story. The characters in this story
decide to test Gödel's theorem by running a computer
program... (more) |
|
|
Gödel, Escher Bach: an eternal golden braid (1979) |
|
| Douglas Hofstadter |
|
Pulitzer Prize wining book whose chapters alternate between fictional
"dialogues" and more standard non-fiction format to present ideas from
philosophy, art, music and psychology as well as mathematical... (more) |
|
|
G103 (2006) |
|
| Oliver Tearne (director) |
|
This short film "shows a surreal day in the life of a mathematics undergraduate" taking the math course G103 at the University of Warwick. In fact, the Website makes it sound as if it is an informational... (more) |
|
|
Galactic Pot-Healer (1969) |
|
| Philip K. Dick |
|
Joe Fernwright, mender of broken pottery in some future Earth
society, but bored out of his mind after months without any pots
to fix, accepts a mysterious invitation to a far planet where... (more) |
|
|
Galactic Rapture (2000) |
|
| Tom Flynn |
|
On a future Earth whose major export to other planets is the Christian religion, mathematician Fram Galbior is a hero for his formula which allows the prediction of the appearance of ``Tuezi''. These... (more) |
|
|
Galileo (1938) |
|
| Bertolt Brecht |
|
Of course, Brecht's biographical play takes more of a political than a mathematical view of the life of the famous astronomer/mathematician. Note that Joseph Losey, who directed the first American production... (more) |
|
|
Gambler's Rose (2000) |
|
| G.W. Hawkes |
|
A picaresque novel about the Halloran family who live by grifting. Charging lunch to their room in a hotel where they aren’t staying and winning a fabulous yacht in a game of poker are the high points,... (more) |
|
|
A Game of Consequences (1998) |
|
| David Langford |
|
Two reckless researchers at "The Mathematics Institute" undertake dangerous "quantum" research based on mathematical mumbo-jumbo like "translating her mathematical intuitions into appropriate quasi-shapes... (more) |
|
|
Gaming Instinct (Spieltrieb) (2004) |
|
| Juli Zeh |
|
[The math in this novel which was a best seller in Germany in 2004 is]
recognizable not only for experts, so it is mentioned in almost every
review. Zeh learned about game theory and the prisoner's... (more) |
|
|
The Gangs of New Math (2005) |
|
| Robert W. Vallin |
|
This humorous short story about a brawl in a pub of mathematicians appeared in the November 2005 issue of Math Horizons magazine. There is quite a bit of "mathematical name-dropping" in the form of quick... (more) |
|
|
The Ganymede Club (1995) |
|
| Charles Sheffield |
|
A group of space explorers attempt to protect the secret that they are no longer aging in this well written SF novel. Although these (essentially) immortal characters are not especially mathematical,... (more) |
|
|
The Gates of Heaven (1984) |
|
| Paul Preuss |
|
The plot concerns a mathematician whose career has been monotone decreasing. But he comes alive again when a SETI project finds a human message coming from 12 light years away. It seems somebody must have fallen into something like a black hole and our hero tries to understand what happened.
(more) |
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|
|
Gauntlet (2009) |
|
| Richard Aaron |
|
An autistic mathematician helps stop a terrorist plot. The use of real mathematical terms suggests that the author knows something about math. The awkward way in which they are (mis)used suggests that... (more) |
|
|
Gödel Numbers (1969) |
|
| J.W. Swanson |
|
The story revolves around an ancient stone artifact found near Cairo which has engraved markings of slanted lines. In an incredible non-sequitor, one of the characters in the story guesses that the numbers... (more) |
|
|
Gödel's Sunflowers (1992) |
|
| Stephen Baxter |
|
Far in the future, a human explores a giant fractal construction which is a
physical realization of the total knowledge of the creatures which created
it long ago. In the process he learns about Gödel's... (more) |
|
|
A Gebra Named Al (1993) |
|
| Wendy Isdell |
|
In this story, Julie falls asleep on her algebra book after
spending a few frustrating minutes trying to finish her homework. An
imaginary number comes to visit her in her room, and transports her
to... (more) |
|
|
Genghis Khan and 888 (2005) |
|
| Jason Earls |
|
As one might guess from the title of the literary journal in which it was published ("Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens #4"), this story is a bit strange. According to the author, it is absurdist... (more) |
|
|
The Genius (1901) |
|
| Nikolai Georgievich Garin-Mikhailovskii |
|
The Russian Engineer N.G. Mikhailovskii (1852-1906) was also an accomplished author using the pseudonym "N.G. Garin". His short story, "The Genius", tells about an Jewish man who fills his notebooks with... (more) |
|
|
Geometria dell'apocalisse (1999) |
|
| Marco Abate (writer) / R. Bogagni (artist) |
|
Italian comic book whose title translates as "Geometry of the Apocalypse".
A (definitely not successful, if I may say so myself) attempt of mixing fractals, impossible murders, racial issues, voodoo gods and the wonderful city of Venice. Remember the city, and forget this story.
Published in
Lazarus Ledd 68, Star Comics, Perugia, 1999, 95 pp (more) |
|
|
The Geometrics of Johnny Day (1941) |
|
| Nelson Bond |
|
Old MacDonald had a firm, and in that firm he had a young mathematician who wanted to win his daughter's hand in marriage. MacDonald was skeptical:
""Ye want a job, eh? And just what is it that ye... (more) |
|
|
Geometry in the South Pacific (1927) |
|
| Sylvia Warner |
|
A chapter from Warner's novel Mr. Fortune's Maggot which was published separately in James Newman's World of Mathematics as if it were a short story.
This is a story about one Tim Fortune, a former... (more) |
|
|
The Geometry of Love (1966) |
|
| John Cheever |
|
"Starring an engineer who takes solace in geometry." (Contributed by
"William E. Emba".) Appears in the collection "The Stories of John
Cheever" (see link).
Published originally in The Saturday Evening Post Jan 1 1966.
(more) |
|
|
The Geometry of Narrative (1983) |
|
| Hilbert Schenck |
|
This story begins with a character who is a graduate student of English proposing to his professor a new geometric approach to literary analysis. As he points out, this has been used to some limited degree... (more) |
|
|
The Geometry of Sisters (2009) |
|
| Luanne Rice |
|
Young Beck hopes her mathematical skills will somehow bring back her dead father. Other reviewers have mostly complained that this novel does not work as the serious family drama it intends to be. From... (more) |
|
|
Getaway from Getawehi (1969) |
|
| Colin Kapp |
|
Colin Kapp has written a few stories which have some good, hard SF mixed up with highly tongue-in-cheek, believable flights of fancy. The present story is set on the single planet, Getawehi, of a rogue... (more) |
|
|
Getting the Combination (1982) |
|
| Isaac Asimov |
|
Griswold figures out a combination by correctly guessing
the next number in a sequence.
AKA "Playing the Numbers". Published originally in the June 1982 issue of Gallery.
(more) |
|
|
Ghost Dancer (2006) |
|
| John Case |
|
The blurb on the cover describes anti-hero Jack Wilson as a "brilliant mathematician" and also a "diabolical madman" in this thriller based on the popular conspiracy theory claiming that Nikola Tesla is... (more) |
|
|
The Ghost from the Grand Banks (1990) |
|
| Arthur C. Clarke |
|
The topics change
from the Titanic to a giant octopus but a central one is the
Mandelbrot set. We are introduced to mathematician-cum-computer
wizard Edith Craig who invents software to fix the Y2K... (more) |
|
|
The Giant Claw (1957) |
|
| Fred F. Sears (director) |
|
Known as possibly one of the worst horror movies of the 20th century, The Giant Claw tells the story of a huge bird from an anti-matter universe who terrorizes airplane pilots (but apparently, not movie... (more) |
|
|
Gifted: A Novel (2007) |
|
| Nikita Lalwani |
|
This novel tells the coming-of-age story of a girl whose Indian father is a professor of mathematics in Wales. She is talented at mathematics and even uses sophisticated math in her everyday life (e.g.... (more) |
|
|
The Gigantic Fluctuation (1973) |
|
| Arkady Strugatsky / Boris Strugatsky |
|
This is an oddly funny story about a man who becomes the "focus point of all miracles in the world", a "gigantic fluctuation". He somehow appears to attract extremely improbably but possible statistical... (more) |
|
|
The Gimatria of Pi (2004) |
|
| Lavie Tidhar |
|
More ``numerology'' than mathematics, this short story is based on the idea that the decimal expansion of π has predictive value. For example, it is portrayed as predicting the assassination of Yitzhak... (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) |
|
|
The Givenchy Code (2005) |
|
| Julie Kenner |
|
You've got to love the tag lines for this book: "A heel-breaking adventure in code-breaking that will bring out the math geek and the fashionista in you". "Cryptography is the new black".
A woman with... (more) |
|
|
Global Dawn (2007) |
|
| Deborah Gelbard |
|
Geometry, especially the notion of the "tilted square", plays a mathematical as well as a spiritual role in the ambitious project undertaken in this novel. According to the author, "The protagonist aims... (more) |
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|
|
Glory (2007) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
The story talks about a xenomathematician's quest to understand hieroglyphic tablets on an alien planet containing the mathematical knowledge of an extinct civilization. The extinct aliens had apparently... (more) |
|
|
The Gnome and the Pearl of Wisdom: A Fable (1977) |
|
| Richard Willmott |
|
A greedy gnome with a countably infinite collection of marbles wants to
trade it with Merlin the mathematician for his beautiful "pearl of
wisdom". Merlin takes advantage of the gnomes unfamiliarity... (more) |
|
|
Go, Little Book (1972) |
|
| Isaac Asimov |
|
Combinatorics is used to break a "matchbook code".
One of the "Black Widower" mysteries written for Ellery Queen magazine.
See also these [2, 3] other BW stories. (more) |
|
|
God and Stephen Hawking (2000) |
|
| Robin Hawdon |
|
Although most people know him as a "scientist", Stephen Hawking is probably the best known living mathematician. (Technically, he is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University.) This play examines his life and work.
(more) |
|
|
God Doesn't Shoot Craps (2006) |
|
| Richard Armstrong |
|
Danny Pellegrino is a con artist who joins up with inventor/genius Virgil Kirk to market a mathematical get-rich-quick scheme which, amazingly, actually works.
The gambling scheme which Kirk calls... (more) |
|
|
The God Equation (2007) |
|
| Michael A.R. Co |
|
The angel Azrael is ordered to kill a Philippine mathematician who is using the Internet to create a mathematical proof of the existence of God.
In this story, Azrael is presented as a hitman who kills... (more) |
|
|
The God Patent (2009) |
|
| Ransom Stephens |
|
After his life falls apart, an engineer tries to revive a collaboration with the fundamentalist Christian with whom he once wrote two patents based on the Bible. While he viewed these patents for what... (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) |
|
|
The Gold-Bug (1843) |
|
| Edgar Allan Poe |
|
Not only does this very famous Poe story contain a (very little) bit of mathematics in the form of a probabilistic approach to cryptography and a geometric description of the treasure hunt on the ground (as pointed out by William E. Emba), it is especially notable for the fact that it takes place here in Charleston : )
The entire story is available on-line...follow the link above or below. (more) |
|
|
Goldman's Theorem (2009) |
|
| R.J. Stern |
|
Hired by the little-known "University of Northern Vermont", Professor Goldman does not seem to be living up to his promise as a great math researcher. Under pressure from his superiors, he claims to have... (more) |
|
|
Goliijo (2007) |
|
| Alex Rose |
|
A very cute, mind-tickling short tale about a place called “Goliijo”. References to Mandelbrot’s paper on British coastline and the Koch curve lead the reader to a description of Goliijo, which... (more) |
|
|
Gomez (1954) |
|
| C.M. Kornbluth |
|
this story is about a physics prodigy, but a mathematical equation
appears in it -- the first time I read story the equation didn't make any
sense to me, but eventually I realized that it was a... (more) |
|
|
Good Benito (1994) |
|
| Alan P. Lightman |
|
This novel presents many instances in the life of mathematical physicist
Bennett Lang, the "Benito" of the title. The different scenes, presented
non-chronologically, cover most of his life from early... (more) |
|
|
Good Will (1989) |
|
| Jane Smiley |
|
A poor couple living on a rural farm deal with the intrusions of the "outside world", including an affluent and worldly African-American math professor and her young daughter.
I don't think there... (more) |
|
|
Good Will Hunting (1997) |
|
| Gus Van Sant (director) / Matt Damon (Screenplay) |
|
A young janitor at MIT solves a (supposedly) difficult problem left on
a black board by a Fields medalist. This successful film did make
many more people aware of the existence of the Fields medal.... (more) |
|
|
The Gostak and the Doshes (1930) |
|
| Miles J. Breuer (M.D.) |
|
In this classic science fiction story, a mathematical physicist convinces his friend to try to travel into another dimension by merely altering the way he thinks about things. The friend finds himself... (more) |
|
|
The Grand Wheel (1977) |
|
| Barrington J. Bayley |
|
This is primarily space opera, but with a mathematical element in
the fictional discovery of randomatics: a science which shows that
the Gambler's Fallacy is true under certain conditions, enabling
random... (more) |
|
|
The Grass and Tree (2003) |
|
| Eliot Fintushel |
|
The Banach-Tarski paradox is invoked repeatedly as the underlying
explanation for shapeshifting. And higher-dimensional generalizations
prove crucial to the plot. The author goes so far as to cite... (more) |
|
|
Gravity's Rainbow (1973) |
|
| Thomas Pynchon |
|
In this novel "there's "mathematicians'
graffiti" and a lot of musing on the Poisson-curve. See, for ex. page 140 in
the Pengiun 20th century classics edition.
(Okay, I'll admit it. I have not... (more) |
|
|
Ground Zero Man (The Peace Machine) (1971) |
|
| Bob Shaw |
|
A self-described `unimportant mathematician' who works on guidance systems for a British weapons manufacturer discovers, just by playing around with the formulas, a way to cause the explosion of every... (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) |
|
|
Gut Symmetries (1997) |
|
| Jeanette Winterson |
|
Two love affairs: one between a pair of physicists and the other between
the female physicist and her lovers wife. (The author presents this
analogy: A love triangle reduced to a line.)
It is often... (more) |
|
|
Habitus (1998) |
|
| James Flint |
|
There is no doubt that this novel is a work of mathematical fiction, but I'm not sure how to describe it. I think the best word for it may be "uneven". It does some great things, both presenting some... (more) |
|
|
Hamisch in Avalon (1995) |
|
| Eliot Fintushel |
|
This story marks the return of the Yiddishe mystic Izzy and his daughter
in-law (now a math professor) Hamisch previously encountered in Izzy at the Lucky Three. There isn't as much math in
this story,... (more) |
|
|
Hannah, Divided (2002) |
|
| Adele Griffin |
|
The story of a 13 year old girl living in rural Pennsylvania in 1934,
"Hannah" presents us with yet another fictional account of someone who is
not only talented in mathematics but also psychologically... (more) |
|
|
Hapgood (1988) |
|
| Tom Stoppard |
|
A brief discussion of Euler's solution to the Königsburg Bridge Problem appears in Stoppard's play about espionage and quantum physics.
When a British physicist double-agent is accused of giving... (more) |
|
|
The Happening (2008) |
|
| M. Night Shyamalan (writer and director) |
|
John Leguizamo's character is a math professor who keeps using uplifting percentage statistics to cheer up. At one point, he asks a panick-stricken woman the question, "if I give you a penny the first... (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) |
|
|
Herbrand's Conjecture and the White Sox Scandal (1993) |
|
| Eliot Fintushel |
|
Hi, I'm Eliot Fintushel, the author of HERBRAND'S CONJECTURE AND THE WHITE
SOX SCANDAL. The idea is that the mathematical logician Jacques Herbrand
who actually did die in a mountaineering accident... (more) |
|
|
The Heroic Adventures of Hercules Amsterdam (2003) |
|
| Melissa Glenn Haber |
|
The plot focuses on a three inch tall boy who runs away from humans to live with mice, only to discover that the mice are regularly massacred by rats every seven years. The mice, however, cannot anticipate... (more) |
|
|
Herr Doctor's Wondrous Smile (1998) |
|
| Vladimir Tasic |
|
In this short story, a logician who really does not take the superstitions
of numerology seriously is invited to a "fringe" conference where he
delivers a talk on the mystical implications of Gregory... (more) |
|
|
Het gemillimeterde hoofd (The Cropped Head) (1967) |
|
| Gerrit Krol |
|
It was published in 1967 by Querido, Amsterdam, and seems to
have been translated into Italian (La testa millimetrata). There is a
lot of mathematics in this experimental novel (Hans Freudenthal
judged:... (more) |
|
|
Hidden in Glass (1931) |
|
| Paul Ernst |
|
A murder mystery involving a mathematical physicist. One Professor Brainard, who is claimed to have mastered "the secret of the fourth dimension" (haven't they all in the pulps?), has a serious professional... (more) |
|
|
A Higher Geometry (2006) |
|
| Sharelle Byars Moranville |
|
A teenage girl in the 1950's pursues her dream of becoming a mathematician in the American midwest over a background of sexism, romance and Cold War politics. This fictional account mirrors some of the... (more) |
|
|
Hilbert's Hotel (1999) |
|
| Ian Stewart |
|
Another take on the idea (attributed to lectures by David Hilbert) that the bizarre properties of the countably infinite can best be presented through the analogy of a hotel. Here, Mr. and Mrs. Smith... (more) |
|
|
A Hill on the Dark Side of the Moon (1983) |
|
| Lennart Hjulström |
|
A Swedish film about the life of Sonia Kovalevsky. The title refers,
apparently, to a site on the moon which was actually named in her
honor. The film tend to avoid the mathematics (for example, melodramatic... (more) |
|
|
His Master's Voice (1968) |
|
| Stanislaw Lem |
|
In this book, we follow the investigations of a team of scientists and mathematicians trying to figure out the meaning of an apparent "message" being sent through space. The novel is written with "tongue... (more) |
|
|
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) |
|
| Douglas Adams |
|
Everyone ought to read this trilogy of four (or is it five now?) books that brilliantly combine science fiction with the drollest of British humor. Despite my high regard for it, I've not added it to... (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 Holmes-Ginsbook Device (1969) |
|
| Isaac Asimov |
|
A scientist recounts how, stung by his former professor
hogging all the credit for figuring out a way to safely
light cigarettes and girlwatch at the same time, he and
... (more) |
|
|
Holy Disorders (1945) |
|
| Edmund Crispin |
|
Edmund
Crispin, pseudonym of Bruce Montgomery is generally considered the last of the British high literate mystery writers. He wrote a series of mysteries starring Gervase Fen, Oxford don, highly... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Hypatia (2000) |
|
| Mac Wellman |
|
Artistically produced off-Broadway play about the famous female
mathematician who was tortured to death by Christian monks in the 5th
Century. (more) |
|
|
Hypatia: New Foes with an Old Face (1852) |
|
| Charles Kingsley |
|
A fictionalized account of the life and murder of Hypatia, once
recognized as the greatest living mathematician in the Greco-Roman world. This
book, written in 1852 by Reverend Kingsley, focuses more... (more) |
|
|
The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin (1927) |
|
| Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi |
|
Written by a distant relative of the more famous author Count Tolstoy,
by one of the first Russian science fiction writers, this tells the
story of a mad scientist who tries to take over the world,... (more) |
|
|
I of Newton (1970) |
|
| Joe Haldeman |
|
In this short story a mathematics professor accidentally summons a demon
by cursing while working on a problem involving integration. The devil
brags
that he is able to disprove Fermat's last theorem,... (more) |
|
|
I padroni del caos (2003) |
|
| A. Russo (writer) / Esposito Brothers (artists) |
|
An Italian comic book whose title translates as "Masters of Chaos".
Not much mathematics in here, but several of the characters are mathematicians. They've better
not talk about mathematics (the writer... (more) |
|
|
I Sin Every Number (2007) |
|
| Jason Earls |
|
This is another work of experimental fiction from Jason Earls that combines some real computational number theory, some mathematical terminology used within nonsense for poetic effect, and a science fiction... (more) |
|
|
Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in his Labyrinth (1951) |
|
| Jorge Luis Borges |
|
Two friends, a poet and a mathematician (who is described as the author of a study on "the theorem which Fermat did not write in the margin of a page of Diophantus") arrive at an abandoned house in the... (more) |
|
|
L' idée fixe du Savant Cosinus (1899) |
|
| Christophe -- Georges Colomb |
|
This humorous and profusely illustrated French book is considered to be an early example of what we might today call a "comic book".
Cosinus is a mathematician who
desperately wants to travel around... (more) |
|
|
The Ifth of Oofth (1957) |
|
| Walter Trevis |
|
[This] is a short, zany, tall-tale reminiscent of Heinlein's "And He Built A Crooked House". Someone ends up making a 3-dimensional, unfolded projection of a 5-dimensional hypercube, a Penteract. The... (more) |
|
|
The Image in the Mirror (1933) |
|
| Dorothy Leigh Sayers |
|
Lord Peter Wimsey, while staying at an inn, finds a stranger is
completely rapt in reading and rereading from a book of Wimsey's.
It turns out to be H G Wells' story of a man inverted via the
fourth... (more) |
|
|
The Imaginary (1942) |
|
| Isaac Asimov |
|
As Asimov notes in his afterword to it (in THE EARLY ASIMOV), it is mostly about the idea of applying mathematical formulae to psychology, which he later did with his psychohistory in the "Foundation"... (more) |
|
|
The Imaginary Number (1956) |
|
| Yizhak Oren |
|
In this peculiar and humorous story, a complete stranger
shows up at physicist Benjamin's door, with an imaginary
tale of their childhood friendship, marriage to twin sisters,
and his deed to certain... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Immortal Bird (1961) |
|
| H. Russell Wakefield |
|
Professor Brandley, a "young" man of 53, wants nothing more than to attain the position of Regius Professor of Pure Mathematics at the Metropolitan University in London so that he could train "disciples... (more) |
|
|
Immune Dreams (1978) |
|
| Ian Watson |
|
A creepy but interesting story that combines the genetics of cancer, the neurology of dreaming, immunology, and the mathematics of catastrophe theory (a precursor of what we now call "chaos theory"). ... (more) |
|
|
Imperativ (1982) |
|
| Krzysztof Zanussi |
|
It is about a mathematician (a probability professor) in existential crisis about the nature of necessity and chance.
(more) |
|
|
Improbable (2005) |
|
| Adam Fawer |
|
A probability expert suffering from epilepsy (with hints of schizophrenia) is in over his head with gambling debts to the Russian mob and a beautiful, renegade CIA agent before discovering that he has... (more) |
|
|
In Fading Suns and Dying Moons (2003) |
|
| John Varley |
|
There is an explicit reference not only to mathematics, but to mathematical fiction in this scary short story. When strange creatures with an unusual interest in butterflies begin appearing on the Earth, it takes a mathematician and familiarity with Abbott's Flatland to understanding what is going on. (more) |
|
|
In Good King Charles's Golden Days (1939) |
|
| George Bernard Shaw |
|
Considered by many to be Shaw's worst play, this late example of his
witty writing may be of special interest to visitors to this site. It
takes place at the home of Sir Isaac Newton where he is joined... (more) |
|
|
In The Country of the Blind (1990) |
|
| Michael Flynn |
|
Sarah Beaumont escaped from the modern American ghetto to become a successful journalist, programmer and real estate investor. However, while investigating an idea for developing her latest real estate... (more) |
|
|
In the Courts of the Sun (2009) |
|
| Brian D'Amato |
|
A modern descendant of the Mayans and his former mentor (a game theorist) realize that the famous Mayan prediction that the world will end in the year 2012 is based on some seemingly reasonable math, and... (more) |
|
|
In the River (2006) |
|
| Justin Stanchfield |
|
A female mathematics professor undergoes a surgical procedure to enable her to live and communicate with aquatic aliens. Her goal is to learn to understand their mathematics well enough to reproduce their... (more) |
|
|
In the Shadow of Gotham (2009) |
|
| Stefanie Pintoff |
|
A murder mystery in which the victim is a female math grad student at Columbia University working on the Riemann Hypothesis.
Gifted in math, Sarah had just begun her fourth year in Columbia's graduate... (more) |
|
|
Incandescence (2008) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
This "hard SF" novel focuses on the scientific progress of aliens living on a planet near the galactic center. Presumably because the curvature of space was obvious to them from the start (while it took... (more) |
|
|
Incompleteness (2004) |
|
| Apostolos Doxiadis |
|
A play by the author of Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture on the last, sad days in the life of Kurt Gödel. After a "workshop production" in Athens, Greece (June 24-28, 2003) the show's official... (more) |
|
|
The Indefatigable Frog (1953) |
|
| Philip K. Dick |
|
A parody of science utilizing the old "Zeno's Paradox". Originally appeared in Fantastic Story Magazine (July 1953) and republished
recently in The Ascent of Wonder. (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 Assassin (1991) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
Originally published in `Interzone #48', June 1991.
There are multiple realities. As the narrator puts it, `the number of
parallel worlds is uncountably infinite - infinite like the real numbers,
not... (more) |
|
|
Infinite Jest (1996) |
|
| David Foster Wallace |
|
The twenty page passage on Eschaton, with the Mean
Value Theorem footnote, is possibly the best use of mathematics in fiction I've
ever seen.
this book has some of the most interesting and complete... (more) |
|
|
The Infinite Plane (1981) |
|
| Paul J. Nahin |
|
As a student, Richard Mackley discussed some philosophical aspects of the
mathematical abstraction of an infinite plane with his math
professor. For instance, they noted that the plane would look the... (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) |
|
|
Infinitely Near (1999) |
|
| Anthony Cristiano |
|
An 8 minute long, black and white film with no dialogue showing intertwined scenes of a student having trouble with the concept of a limit in his calculus class and other scenes from his life. The director... (more) |
|
|
Infinities (2002) |
|
| John Barrow |
|
This play, written by Cambridge cosmologist John Barrow, has been produced and performed in Italy (Milan and Valencia). It is made up of five separate vignettes several of which touch on the deep mathematics... (more) |
|
|
The Infinities (2010) |
|
| John Banville |
|
As mathematician Adam Godley lies seemingly unconscious and dying in bed, his family and professional rival wander through his home.
The title is a reference to the computational anomalies in quantum... (more) |
|
|
The Infinitive of Go (1980) |
|
| John Brunner |
|
John Brunner's novel, "The Infinitive of Go" is a story about teleporting devices based on a "posting" principle affecting living objects in the process of "posting" - the author describes it in terms... (more) |
|
|
Infinity (1996) |
|
| Patricia Broderick |
|
It's about the early years of Richard Feynman, up to the completion
of the Manhattan Project, and the death of his wife.
What I like particularily is a scene in NY's Chinatown where [Feynman]
races... (more) |
|
|
Inflexible Logic (1940) |
|
| Russell Maloney |
|
There is a famous example of probability which (in one of its many
forms) states that six chimpanzees randomly typing at six typewriters
would eventually reproduce all of the books in the British museum.... (more) |
|
|
The Ingenious Mr. Spinola (1924) |
|
| Ernest Bramah |
|
Max Carrados is a blind amateur detective genius, quite popular in the early 20th century, but mostly forgotten since then. (Such is also the fate of E.B.'s Kai Lung fantasy stories.)
... (more) |
|
|
Inherit the Stars (1977) |
|
| James P. Hogan |
|
50,000 old human remains are found on the moon, along with lots of
documentation. The entry point to deciphering the totally unknown
language is mathematical tables and formulae."
(more) |
|
|
Inquirendo Island (1886) |
|
| Hudor Genone |
|
A very long, thinly disguised satire on sectarian splits in Religion, fairly nicely written. A man lost at sea is ship-wrecked on an island called “Inquirendo Island”, probably a sarcastic aside... (more) |
|
|
Inside Out (1987) |
|
| Rudy Rucker |
|
The story itself is quite disturbing IMO but has the usual zaniness of his other writings. Features quarks as "hypertoroidal vortex rings/loops of superstring", a "cumberquark", "hypertorii with fuzzy... (more) |
|
|
An Instance of the Fingerpost (1999) |
|
| Iain Pears |
|
A murder mystery set in Oxford in the 1660's. Mathematician John
Wallis plays a major role as a character in the book (and Newton a
small role). See the review at MAA
online.
A very fine piece of 'faction', with 2
real and 2 imaginary characters it is
quite the best of Pear's works
(including the later Scipio). A great
read.
(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) |
|
|
Into Darkness (1992) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
Creepy story about a man who volunteers to rescue people from a
worm-hole that randomly appears in cities, killing anyone who is not
able to make it to the center of the spacetime-distortion before it
disappears.... (more) |
|
|
Into the Comet (1960) |
|
| Arthur C. Clarke |
|
When a computer malfunction prevents the crew of a spaceship from being able to determine a trajectory back to Earth, they are forced to resort to using an abacus to aid in the computation. [Note that... (more) |
|
|
Into Thin Air (2000) |
|
| Colin Adams |
|
This was the first of Colin Adams' ``Mathematically Bent'' columns for the Mathematical Intelligencer, published back in Vol.22, No. 1, 2000. It combines many of the analogies between mountain climbing... (more) |
|
|
|
|
The Inverted World (1974) |
|
| Christopher Priest |
|
About a mobile city that must tap its
power from a mysterious `optimum point', which is less effective for
their engines as it gets more distant. Weird distortion of the
surrounding world is based... (more) |
|
|
The Investigation (1959) |
|
| Stanislaw Lem |
|
In investigating a bizarre case of missing -- and apparently resurrected bodies -- an investigator at Scotland Yard consults mystics, philosophers, and (most significantly to the book as well as to this... (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 and her creative teaching
methods.
Quirky and fun. Unique and intriguing writing style. Loved it.
(more) |
|
|
Irrational Numbers (2008) |
|
| Robert Spiller |
|
Another mystery about high school math teacher Bonnie Pinkwater by the author of Witch of Agnesi. Like the others in this series, this is a murder mystery with adult themes (violence, homosexuality, etc.)... (more) |
|
|
The Island of Five Colors (1952) |
|
| Martin Gardner |
|
In this sequel to The No-sided Professor, our
heroes tackle the Four Color Theorem, which was
unproved at the time. (See here for a brief summary of a recent proof.) Included are some historically... (more) |
|
|
It was the Monster from the Fourth Dimension (1951) |
|
| Al Feldstein |
|
I found a story from a Weird Science issue of 1951 (i believe it's # 7) titled It Was the Monster From the Fourth Dimension. It's written and drawn by Al Feldstein.
It is about a farmer whose farm... (more) |
|
|
It's My Turn (1980) |
|
| Claudia Weill (director) |
|
About a mathematician who writes a proof of the Snake Lemma at the
speed of
light. Her love interest was Michael Douglas, some sort of athlete.
One mathematician I know claims he wrote a paper just... (more) |
|
|
Izzy at the Lucky Three (1996) |
|
| Eliot Fintushel |
|
There are two kinds of weird: good weird and bad weird. This story
is the third kind. I mean, what can you say about a story in which the
Yiddishe mystic Izzy encounters
the demon spirit who created... (more) |
|
|
Jack of Eagles (1952) |
|
| James Blish |
|
Blish bases this novel on a quasi-mathematical explanation of ESP and psycho-kinesis which was really not necessary and doesn’t hold together at all (“the activity of the psi mechanism as a whole... (more) |
|
|
The Janus Equation (1980) |
|
| Steven G. Spruill |
|
In an alternate reality where John Kennedy survived the assassination attempt and replaced all national governments with five all-powerful corporations, an award-winning mathematician tries to invent a... (more) |
|
|
Jayden's Rescue (2002) |
|
| Vladimir Tumanov |
|
I am the author of a children's math mystery novel entitled Jayden's
Rescue and
Published by Scholastic Canada. This novel's plot revolves around
mathematical puzzles for the grades 4-6 level. The... (more) |
|
|
The Jester and the Mathematician (2000) |
|
| Alan R. Gordon |
|
A short historical fiction piece involving Leonardo of Pisa ("Fibonacci"). Interesting story which features Fibonacci talking briefly about his rabbit-series/sequence, his abacus-duel with Pisa's foremost... (more) |
|
|
John Jones's Dollar (1927) |
|
| Harry Stephen Keeler |
|
The main mathematical content of this science fiction story is an illustration of the potential of exponential growth in the form of considering how a single dollar invested in a bank would grow in value... (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) |
|
|
Journey into Geometries (1997) |
|
| Marta Sved |
|
It is styled after a frequently-used device: "Alice in X", where X can be any kind of space which you wish to explain to the gentle reader. In this instance, Alice, along with Lewis Carroll and a Doctor... (more) |
|
|
Journey to the Center of Mathematics (2006) |
|
| Colin Adams |
|
A parody of the classic Jules Verne tale, which reads like what Woody Allen would have written if he had taken math instead of philosophy at NYU:
The next day, we booked travel on a steamer across the... (more) |
|
|
The Judge's House (1914) |
|
| Bram Stoker |
|
A math student seeks a quiet place to study for his exams but winds up battling an angry ghost. Stoker certainly knew mathematical words to throw around (e.g. quaternions and conic sections), but this... (more) |
|
|
Jumpers (1989) |
|
| Tom Stoppard |
|
In a philosophical monologue on the nature of morality, a main character considers Zeno's paradox and infinitesimals and imagines a circle as a limit of polygons. (more) |
|
|
Jurassic Park (1990) |
|
| Michael Crichton |
|
Although there is really not much mathematics in this SF thriller at all, the
mathematician (played in the
film by
Jeff Goldbloom) has an important role as the only
person smart enough to recognize... (more) |
|
|
Kandelman's Krim: A Realistic Fantasy (1957) |
|
| John Lighton Synge |
|
Thanks for Tony Vance for pointing out to me that this novel by mathematical physicist J.L. Synge should be included in my database. It is difficult to find now, but it is clear that at the time of its... (more) |
|
|
Kavanagh (1849) |
|
| Henry Wadsworth Longfellow |
|
In the fourth chapter of this novel by the famous poet, the school teacher of the title tries to convince his skeptical wife that mathematics can be poetic by reading to her from Lilavati.
(This one chapter was published separately as Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, 3 (1855), pages 257–62, and so I will consider it both as a short story and as an excerpt from a novel.) (more) |
|
|
Kavita Through Glass (2002) |
|
| Emily Ishem Raboteau |
|
A loosely practicing Muslim graduate student in mathematics
has great difficulty understanding his Hindu wife. He tries
to understand her, love, and life in general via mathematics,
regarding which... (more) |
|
|
Kepler: A Novel (1981) |
|
| John Banville |
|
Johannes Kepler, the most famous Rennaissance court mathematician,
is remembered today for his successes, especially his explicit
description of planetary orbits. However, he also had some rather
strange... (more) |
|
|
Ker-Plop (1979) |
|
| Ted Reynolds |
|
Two branches of humanity meet after 300,000 years without
contact. At one point, comparison is made between their
different modes of existence via explicit... (more) |
|
|
A Killer Theorem (2007) |
|
| Colin Adams |
|
Mangum, P.I. returns in this mystery in which the unproven Gauss' Last Lemma is wielded as a murder weapon. Apparently, a certain approach to proving it is so enticing that merely showing it to mathematicians... (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) |
|
|
The Killion (1982) |
|
| Ian Frazier |
|
Fans of Monty Python will recall the joke so funny that anyone who reads it dies laughing. Frazier brings us the mathematical analogue: a number so big that it kills anyone who tries to think about it. This is the only mathematical story in the funny collection called "Dating your Mom".
(more) |
|
|
The Kissing Number (1992) |
|
| Ian Stewart |
|
Published as part of his "Mathematical Recreations" column in Scientific
American (February 1992), this story concerns human colonists on Mars
who are trying to figure out how many non-overlapping "circular"... (more) |
|
|
La fiamma sul ghiaccio (The Flame on the Ice) (2006) |
|
| Umberto Marino (director) |
|
An Italian movie about a mathematician with Asperger's syndrome.
The role of the protagonist is played by
Raoul Bova. According to Bova, It's the story of a young mathematics
professor afflicted with... (more) |
|
|
La formula di Ramanujan (2001) |
|
| Marco Abate (writer) / P. Ongaro (artist) |
|
A trip from Berkeley to India via Oxford to recover the lost Ramanujan's notebooks, pursued independently
by two (again, realistic) mathematicians, both driven by revenge, though of different kind.
Along... (more) |
|
|
La vie mode d'emploi (1978) |
|
| George Perec |
|
La vie mode d'emploi' describes the lives of the inhabitants of a building
in Paris. Perec was a member of the Oulipo group - you mention this group
in relation with Berge's short story, 'Who killed... (more) |
|
|
The Labyrinth Key (2004) |
|
| Howard V. Hendrix |
|
In the near future, the US and China engage in a race involving
the ultimate quantum computer and quantum cryptography. Along
the way, numerous mathematical concepts are cited and sometimes
discussed,... (more) |
|
|
The Lady's Code (2006) |
|
| Samantha Saxon |
|
The third in a series of romance novels about intelligent, confident women, The Lady's Code features Lady Juliet Pervell, who has ruined her reputation in social circles but earned an honorary degree in... (more) |
|
|
Lambada (1990) |
|
| Joel Silbert (Director and Writer) / Sheldon Renan (Screenplay) |
|
A blend of "Stand and Deliver" with "Dirty Dancing" in which a high school math teacher who spends his evenings doing lambada dance moves in night clubs. He appears to be a very dedicated teacher, and... (more) |
|
|
The Last Answer (1980) |
|
| Isaac Asimov |
|
Physicist Murray Templeton dies and is then surprised to find that he somehow still exists. Murray engages in a conversation with his Creator (who is bemused at being called `God'),... (more) |
|
|
The Last Casino (2004) |
|
| Pierre Gill (director) /
Steven Westren (screenplay) |
|
A fairly amateurish movie about a Math professor who is an expert card-counter and ipso facto, banned from most casinos. So he trains 3 math graduates to count cards and work as a team to fleece casinos... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Last Magician (1952) |
|
| Bruce Elliott |
|
Science-fiction story about a magician performing for aliens using a Klein bottle as a prop. (more) |
|
|
The Last Starship from Earth (1968) |
|
| John Boyd |
|
A mathematician named Haldane IV and a poet named Helix fall in love and try to learn the truth about the famous 19th century mathematician Fairweather I. Unfortunately, both of these things are against... (more) |
|
|
The Last Theorem (2008) |
|
| Arthur C. Clarke / Frederik Pohl |
|
Ranjit Subramanian, the protagonist in this science fiction novel, is a young Sri Lankan man who (re)discovers a short and elementary proof of Fermat's Last Theorem while enduring torture during an unjust... (more) |
|
|
The Law (1947) |
|
| Robert M. Coates |
|
In this story, the "law of averages" ceases to apply (so that, for instance, everyone in Manhattan decides to drive across the Triborough Bridge on the same evening). As a result, it is necessary for... (more) |
|
|
Le théorème de Travolta (2002) |
|
| Olivier Courcelle |
|
The adventures of a young mathematician
trapped in the curious and delirious world of a
mathematical congress. A cross between
David Lodge and Groucho Marx.
I believe it has not been translated
into english (but should)
(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) |
|
|
Leap (2004) |
|
| Lauren Gunderson |
|
This play explores the inspiration for Isaac Newton's amazing discoveries in 1664, personifying it in the form of two young girls whose playful interaction leads to the results we remember Newton for today.... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Left or Right (1951) |
|
| Martin Gardner |
|
Originally published in Esquire magazine in 1951, this story
about a space ship "flipping" through the fourth dimension has rarely
been seen because Gardner later worried that it was physically inaccurate.... (more) |
|
|
The Legend of Howard Thrush (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
I always have enjoyed the American folk tale, a medium in which one pretends to be speaking earnestly and in all sincerity about a history so ridiculous that it it simply cannot be taken seriously. There... (more) |
|
|
Il Lemma di Levemberg (1996) |
|
| Marco Abate (writer) / S. Natali (artist) |
|
Published in an Italian comic book, this story (whose title translates as "Levemberg's Lemma") was written by Abate and illustrated by Natali. The author describes it for us as follows:
A (possibly... (more) |
|
|
Lepel (2005) |
|
| Willem van de Sande Bakhuyzen (director) /
Mieke de Jong (screenplay) |
|
In this charming family film from the Netherlands, a boy who believes his name is "Lepel" runs away from the mean button thief who has watched over him since his parents disappeared.
If you have come... (more) |
|
|
Letters to a Young Mathematician (2006) |
|
| Ian Stewart |
|
I listed this one here before I had a chance to read it and am now wondering whether it should be counted as fiction at all. This is an excellent book which provides a lot of useful information about... (more) |
|
|
Lewis (Episode: Whom the Gods Would Destroy) (2006) |
|
| Daniel Boyle (Screenwriter) |
|
[I may need assistance from some British site visitors on this one!] An e-mail from Charles Freudenthal has suggested to me that the pilot episode of the TV Series "Lewis" (a spin-off of the popular Inspector... (more) |
|
|
The Library of Babel (1974) |
|
| Jorge Luis Borges |
|
Years ago, I read The Library of Babel in a volume of collected short
stories by [Argentinian] Jorge Luis Borges, published under the title,
Labyrinths and translated from the [Spanish]. Like many... (more) |
|
|
The Library Paradox (2006) |
|
| Catherine Shaw |
|
Vanessa Duncan returns as the skilled amateur detective of Victorian England in this third mystery novel by "Catherine Shaw". (See The Three-Body Problem and Flowers Stained with Moonlight for the earlier... (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) |
|
|
Life in a Mirror (2003) |
|
| Daniel Ryan |
|
This e-book not only contains many explicit references to mathematics, but it also claims to follow the outline of a mathematical text!
Set in 18th century Brittany, the story is ostensibly about royalty... (more) |
|
|
life.exe (2006) |
|
| Jason Rogers |
|
This work of fiction is not strictly narrative. It is hard to say what is happening since the characters live in the world of "the matrix". Not like the Wachowski Bros.'s epic trilogy of films (though... (more) |
|
|
The Light of Other Days (2000) |
|
| Arthur C. Clarke / Stephen Baxter |
|
Using the WormCam (a camera sent through a wormhole in space-time), it is
possible to witness any event that is taking or has taken place in the
universe. This makes privacy essentially an obsolete... (more) |
|
|
The Limit of Delta Y Over Delta X (1994) |
|
| Richard Cumyn |
|
Here is a calculus example from a book with a title that can not
be more mathematical. I printed this one in a calculus book that I
wrote for my business/economics calculus class. I also read it out... (more) |
|
|
Lines of Longitude (1997) |
|
| Stephen Baxter |
|
The story tries to delve into Hawking's idea of imaginary time - how it may occur that at the beginning of the universe, time and space were ambiguously defined, smeared out into each other as a flattened... (more) |
|
|
Little People (2002) |
|
| Tom Holt |
|
Tom Holt is generally considered one of the masters of
comic fantasy. His humour is apparently too British,
though, since he hasn't had an American publisher for
quite some time. The British-only... (more) |
|
|
The Living Equation (1934) |
|
| Nathan Schachner |
|
A mathematician invents a machine that provides abstract mathematical objects ("vectors" and "tensors") a certain reality. His goal is to allow them not to solve equations but to create new ones. However,... (more) |
|
|
The Logic Pool (1997) |
|
| Stephen Baxter |
|
The Logic Pool deals with an intelligence that is similar
to the meme-minds in Gregory Benford's Foundations Fear.
Meme-mind -- I think this means some sort of intelligence whose
existence arises... (more) |
|
|
A Logical Magician (1994) |
|
| Robert Weinberg |
|
A very creative romp through the lore of creatures of mythology and their return in modern times. A computer programmer creates a program to decode ancient texts and find the incantations to invoke powerful... (more) |
|
|
Logicomix (2008) |
|
| Apostolos Doxiadis / Christos Papadimitriou |
|
A graphic novel on the history of mathematical logic by the authors of Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture and Turing. In an interview (available online here) Papadimitriou says:
It is really... (more) |
|
|
The Long Chalkboard (2006) |
|
| Jenny Allen / Jules Feiffer (Illustrator) |
|
Allen's book is a collection of three short-short stories spread
out over book length with illustrations on every page, in the usual
style of children's literature, complete with charmingly simple... (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 Loom of God: Mathematical Tapestries at the Edge of Time (1997) |
|
| Clifford Pickover |
|
A group of time travelers journey back to the time of Pythagoras in an effort to see the origins of mystical mathematics. The journey continues as they explore numerous links between mathematics, nature and mysticism. Concepts featured: pentagonal numbers, perfect numbers, oblong numbers, the golden ratio, and fractals. Religious implications are also discussed.
(more) |
|
|
Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land (2005) |
|
| John Crowley |
|
This book is made up of notes and e-mail messages from a feminist historian interspersed with chapters from a previously unknown novel by Lord Byron which she has discovered while researching his daughter,... (more) |
|
|
Lord Darcy (1966) |
|
| Randall Garrett |
|
The stories in this collection of fantastical murder mysteries take place in an alternate universe where magic rather than science has become the primary human tool for manipulating the world. Frequent... (more) |
|
|
|
|
The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2008) |
|
| Zachary Mason |
|
The introduction to this novel is a work of pseudo-scholarship, explaining how the chapters to follow were decoded by an NSA cryptographer with the help of the author. The intro contains references to... (more) |
|
|
Lost in the Funhouse (1968) |
|
| John Barth |
|
According to the "foreward to the Anchor Books Edition", this
collection of short stories is "strung together on a few echoed and developed themes and [circles] back upon itself; not to close a simple... (more) |
|
|
Love Counts (2005) |
|
| Michael Hastings (libretto) / Michael Nyman (score) |
|
This opera tells the tale of the surprising friendship between a boxer whose career and life are in decline and a mathematics professor who uses arithmetic as a tool to help him out. It premiered in March 2005 at Germany's Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe.
Thanks to Peter Freyd for pointing it out to me. (more) |
|
|
Lovesong of the Electric Bear (2005) |
|
| Snoo Wilson (playwright) |
|
This play about Alan Turing, told from the point of view of Porgy, his teddy bear, was produced as part of the Summer 2005 season at the Potomac Theater Project in Maryland. Turing certainly had both... (more) |
|
|
Luck be a Lady (2009) |
|
| Dean Wesley Smith |
|
A seriously bizarre story about how
Laverne, the Goddess of Luck, has gone missing, and superheroes Poker
Boy, Front Desk Lady, and Screamer go looking for her, only to discover
that the Bookkeeper... (more) |
|
|
Luminous (1995) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
A truly wonderful story in which two math grad students discover that the things we consider to be "truths" in number theory are actually part of a dynamical system, subject to change over time and in... (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) |
|
|
Mad Destroyer (1930) |
|
| Fletcher Pratt |
|
The story is about a mathematician/astronomer who has discovered an exact solution to the multi-body problem in gravitation i.e. a formula which can easily calculate the positions and velocities of N... (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) |
|
|
Magic or Madness (2005) |
|
| Justine Larbalestier |
|
Fibonacci sequences and prime numbers have magical significance in the trilogy of young adult fantasy novels by Australian author Justine Larbalestier. Magic or Madness was the first book in the series, followed by Magic Lessons and Magic's Child.
(more) |
|
|
The Magic Staircase (1946) |
|
| Nelson Slade Bond |
|
A Mathematics professor develops a theory of "intra-dimensional" spaces, hypothesizing that the vast, empty spaces in atoms form a parallel dimension in which alternative histories of "what might have... (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) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Mangum, P.I. (2004) |
|
| Colin Adams |
|
A parody of the hard-boiled private detective genre in which ``P.I.'' stands for ``Principal Investigator'', a phrase familiar to anyone who has applied for a research grant. In this hilarious story,... (more) |
|
|
Manifold: Time (2000) |
|
| Stephen Baxter |
|
After hearing a (rather bogus sounding) mathematical proof that
civilization is headed for disaster, mathematician Cornelius Taine
"sets in motion" this unusual science fiction novel that takes us
through... (more) |
|
|
Many Moons (1943) |
|
| James Thurber |
|
In this famous children's tale about a princess who wants the moon, "the
mathematician" is one of three wisemen who shows himself not to be so
wise. (The jester, on the other hand,...)
It was... (more) |
|
|
The Mask of Zeus (1992) |
|
| Desmond Cory |
|
Math is discussed a lot in this "Professor Dobie Mystery" novel because both the `detective' (Dobie) and the victim (his former Ph.D. student) are mathematicians. Of course, the math doesn't have much... (more) |
|
|
The Math Code (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
A friend of mine once told me that he believes that mathematicians invented intentionally confusing notations to keep others from understanding what they were saying. I'm sure this is not true. We mathematicians... (more) |
|
|
Math Curse (1995) |
|
| Jon Scieszka / Lane Smith (illustrator) |
|
In this children's picture book, the main character finds that "anything can be a math problem" when her elementary school teacher puts a math curse on her. For example:
Unfortunately for me, LUNCH... (more) |
|
|
Math Patrol (1977) |
|
| TV Ontario |
|
"Math Patrol was a 15-minute long educational TV series produced in the late 1970s by TV Ontario about the adventures of a secret agent named "Sydney" who dressed up as a kangaroo with a blue trenchcoat.... (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) |
|
|
Mathemagics (1996) |
|
| Margaret Ball |
|
This novel continues the adventures of characters developed in the
"chicks in chainmail" series of anthologies. As the title implies,
in these fantasy stories about a suburban mom who
lives the life of a warrior in an alternate reality, mathematics is magic.
Specifically, magical incantations take the form of mathematical
equations! (more) |
|
|
Mathematica (1936) |
|
| John Russell Fearn |
|
Using a strange metal which gives them the power to change reality with their thoughts, two humans either summon or create an alien who explains to them that reality is mathematics. Together, they seek... (more) |
|
|
Mathematica Plus (1936) |
|
| John Russell Fearn |
|
In this sequel to Mathematica, the humans, now knowing that everything is mathematics and having been made immortal by the ultimate mathematician, encounter a race of beings somewhere between material... (more) |
|
|
Mathematical Goodbye (1999) |
|
| Hiroshi Mori |
|
Mori is a popular author of mystery novels in Japan and a former professor of engineering at Nagoya University. Li-Chang Hung, who has read the books translated into Chinese, has suggested that I add... (more) |
|
|
|
|
The Mathematical Man (1913) |
|
| Robert Musil |
|
Robert Musil's "The mathematical Man" is an essay, but it is fiction!
Musil uses the foundational crisis of mathematics to draft a new kind
of fiction, modern fiction, later realized in "The Man without
Qualities".... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Mathematical R & D (1979) |
|
| Paul J. Nahin |
|
This short short story, published in the professional journal
IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems describes a
talk by the (fictional) famous mathematician Professor Osgood. Greatly
limited... (more) |
|
|
Mathematically Bent (2000) |
|
| Colin Adams |
|
Geometer and knot-theorist Colin Adams (Williams College, MA) has been writing this short, mathematically-wise and bitingly funny column in the quarterly issues of The Mathematical Intelligencer since... (more) |
|
|
Mathematician Proof (1920) |
|
| Ralph Ellison de Castro |
|
An utterly trite story about a genius of a mathematician (aren’t they all? To wit, “he had the binomial theorem for breakfast, lunched on integral calculus and for his evening meal considered attempts... (more) |
|
|
The Mathematician Repents (2004) |
|
| Estep Nagy |
|
A short story (?) in which Paul Erdős wakes up in the home of a Parisian mathematician, seems a bit confused, wanders around, and says some strange things. No real math is discussed in the story, but... (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) |
|
|
The Mathematics of Magic (1940) |
|
| L. Sprague de Camp / Fletcher Pratt |
|
The "Enchanter Stories" by de Camp and Pratt are a very popular series of SF/fantasy stories whose protagonist, Harold Shea, is able to travel to other universes using symbolic logic. "The Mathematics... (more) |
|
|
The Mathenauts (1964) |
|
| Norman Kagan |
|
In the future presented by this story, only those with a knowledge of
advanced mathematics can travel through space as a Mathenaut;
by "abstracting" (thinking of the space around you as nothing other
than... (more) |
|
|
Mathenauts: Tales of Mathematical Wonder (1987) |
|
| Rudy Rucker (editor) |
|
This collection contains every example of
mathematically oriented SF published between 1962 (when Mathematical
Magpie appeared) and 1987 when this volume was published.
Unfortunately, it is out of print... (more) |
|
|
Mathmakers (1978) |
|
| TV Ontario |
|
Canadian television show (circa 1978) about making a television show.
Humorous story lines illustrate mathematical concepts.
"The program was developed and produced by TVOntario in 1978. Each
episode... (more) |
|
|
MathNet (1987) |
|
| Childrens Television Workshop |
|
A children's TV show in which mysteries are solved using
mathematics. The suspects and victims always ask the investigators
"Are you the police?" To which they reply "No, we're
mathematicians!"... (more) |
|
|
Maths à mort (1990) |
|
| Margot Bruyère |
|
This murder mystery which takes place at the IHES in Paris was originally entitled "Dis-moi qui tu aimes (je te dirai
qui tu hais)". However, it has just been
be republished (Fall of 2002) with a change... (more) |
|
|
Maths on a Plane (2008) |
|
| Phil Trinh |
|
This story, about a student flirting with the attractive woman in the seat next to him on a plane, won the student category of the 2008 New Writers Award from Cambridge University's ``Plus+ Magazine''.... (more) |
|
|
A Matter of Mathematics (1999) |
|
| Brian Wilson Aldiss |
|
A space/time shortcut is found connecting the earth to the moon. Its use
provokes an alien response, consisting of a device encoding within it some
very strange mathematics.
(For those interested, the title story of the Aldiss collection was the
original inspiration for Kubrick/Spielberg's AI.)
Also published as "The Apollo Asteroid". In Crowther and Greenberg (eds)
"Moon Shots". (more) |
|
|
A Matter of Mathematics (2005) |
|
| Tony Ballantyne |
|
A story about the attempt by the British to change the tilt of Earth's axis to create a more suitable environment for themselves and how the Americans foil it. The British have been launching incessant... (more) |
|
|
The Maxwell Equations (1969) |
|
| Anatoly Dnieprov |
|
The math in this story seems very real, though the specifics of it are
inconsequential to the plot. A mathematical physicist in an isolated
city needs help finding a solution to a linearized version... (more) |
|
|
Maxwell's Equations (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
James Clerk Maxwell was the 19th century theoretician who discovered electro-magnetic waves. He is often described as a "physicist", but I would argue that he was a mathematician. Certainly some of his... (more) |
|
|
Mean Girls (2004) |
|
| Tina Fey (screenplay) /Mark S. Waters (director) |
|
In this movie about teenage girls -- written by Tina Fey from Saturday Night Live and inspired by the non-fiction book Queen Bees and Wannabes -- a previously home schooled student (played by Lindsay Lohan)... (more) |
|
|
The Measure of Eternity (2006) |
|
| Sean McMullen |
|
The beautiful servant of an even more beautiful courtesan leaves the palace in an ancient city and finds a beggar proudly shouting "I have nothing" in many different languages. Yet, this beggar seems... (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) |
|
|
Mefisto: A Novel (1986) |
|
| John Banville |
|
Although the mathematics is only discussed in this novel in the vaguest terms, it is of the greatest importance to the book. Gabriel Swan, the main character/narrator is so focused on numbers and equations... (more) |
|
|
The Memory of Whiteness (1985) |
|
| Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
Far in the future of the human race, the brilliant mathematician Holywelkin discovers a new physical theory that allows us to understand particle physics and build the amazing "whitsuns" which in turn... (more) |
|
|
Mercury Rising (1998) |
|
| Harold Becker (director) |
|
Bruce Willis is an FBI agent trying to protect an autistic child whose mathematical abilities allow him to break the government's top secret codes.
Now, it is true that some of the most frequently used... (more) |
|
|
Mersenne's Mistake (2006) |
|
| Jason Earls |
|
This is a nice piece of mathematical fiction (soon to appear in Grafika magazine) in which the mathematician/monk Marin Mersenne encounters a demon with amazing mathematical skills. Like the other stories by Earls, this seems to be designed to showcase the interesting numbers which he has found using computer algebra tools.
(more) |
|
|
Message Found in a Copy of Flatland (1983) |
|
| Rudy Rucker |
|
This is the story that answers the age old question: "What if Flatland was in the basement of a Pakistani restaurant in London?".
The answer is scarier than you might think, especially when you
realize... (more) |
|
|
Micromegas (1752) |
|
| François Marie Arouet de Voltaire |
|
"Micromegas" is a Voltaire short story, obviously inspired by Swift's
Gulliver's Travels. The title character comes from a planet
orbiting Sirius, and stands 120,000 feet tall. Before spelling out
Micromegas'... (more) |
|
|
The Midnighters (Series) (2004) |
|
| Scott Westerfield |
|
Teenagers discover an extra hour to the day during which they can do things while everyone else is frozen. Unfortunately, they also have to worry about the Darklings!
One of the teens, Dess, is interested... (more) |
|
|
Midtown Pythagoras (2007) |
|
| Michael Brodsky |
|
Michael Brodsky is a deconstructionist's dream writer, which for most people,
simply means utterly unreadable. His many novels, stories, and plays inhabit a
world where meaning is just past the reader's... (more) |
|
|
Milo and Sylvie (2000) |
|
| Eliot Fintushel |
|
"Shapeshifting is treated as a form of Banach-Tarski
equidecomposition. And part of a Zorn's Lemma proof
is given explicitly."
This story appeared in the March 2000... (more) |
|
|
Mimsy Were the Borogoves (1943) |
|
| Lewis Padgett (aka Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore) |
|
Far in the future, humans have not only improved their digestive tracts
(eliminating the appendix and shortening their large intestine) and invented a time machine, but they have also invented educational
toys... (more) |
|
|
The Mind-Body Problem (1983) |
|
| Rebecca Goldstein |
|
A philosophy graduate student seduces and marries a famous mathematician. They do not have a great marriage, but we are presented with some thought provoking passages concerning Princeton University,... (more) |
|
|
The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996) |
|
| Barbra Streisand (director) |
|
Love story with Jeff Bridges and Barbra Streisand as math and English
professors (respectively) at Columbia University. We get a detailed
description of the Twin Prime Conjecture (concerning the number... (more) |
|
|
Mirror Image (1972) |
|
| Isaac Asimov |
|
A robot volunteers the aid of his human, Earthling friend to settle a
dispute between a pair of feuding "spacer" mathematicians. It seems that an
old mathematician (over 270 years old in fact) and a... (more) |
|
|
Miscalculations (2000) |
|
| Elizabeth Mansfield |
|
This is one of three "romance novels" listed on the mathematical fiction webpage. It concerns a woman who is a "math whiz" that is
hired to help an attractive millionaire handle his wealth. (For those... (more) |
|
|
Misfit (1939) |
|
| Robert A. Heinlein |
|
A crew of misfits ships out to the asteroid belt. One member turns
out to be a misfit among the misfits: he's a mathematical prodigy.
His skills prove to be very valuable.
reprinted in THE PAST... (more) |
|
|
Mister God, This is Anna (1985) |
|
| Fynn |
|
Though it is presented as if it were non-fiction, it is generally believed that this account concerning a very thoughtful six year old girl is a work of fiction. It is primarily about the girl's philosophy... (more) |
|
|
Moebius (1996) |
|
| Gustavo Daniel Mosquera R. |
|
In this Argentinian film, a mathematician discovers a bizarre topological
explanation for the disappearance of a train in the labrynthian Buenos
Aires subway system. Although based on the short story... (more) |
|
|
Moebius Trip (2006) |
|
| Janny Wurts |
|
Featuring an aging miror-maker who is asked to create a mirror which acts like a moebius strip and shows a reflection of the past and the future. Frankly, I did not think it was done well at all and... (more) |
|
|
Monday Begins on Saturday (1966) |
|
| Arkady Strugatsky / Boris Strugatsky |
|
In this parody of the activity at Soviet research thinktanks, mathematics underlies the "science" of magic. Math is rarely discussed in depth and a knowledge of Russian fairy tales helps the reader to... (more) |
|
|
The Monopole Affair (2003) |
|
| Ken Wharton |
|
This short story in the May 2003 issue of Analog by physicist
Wharton includes references to the role of higher dimensions in string
theory.
References to string theory, but much more about physics than math (which gets a passing mention).
(more) |
|
|
Monster (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
A story about group theory, plagiarism, the untapped potential of a collaboration between mathematics and marketing, the bleak financial future of academia, and the Monster.
This story talks about... (more) |
|
|
Monster's Proof (2009) |
|
| Richard Lewis |
|
With parents and a younger brother who are all "mathematical geniuses", Livey Ell (who is in danger of getting kicked out of cheerleading unless she improves her algebra grades) is a bit too normal. Things... (more) |
|
|
Moriarty by Modem (1995) |
|
| Jack Nimersheim |
|
A cyberversion of Sherlock Holmes is created to track down an accidently
released cyberversion of Moriarty. The big clue involves both the binomial
theorem and binomial variables.
Published in... (more) |
|
|
Mortal Immortal (1833) |
|
| Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley |
|
This fantasy story by the author of Frankenstein, about a man who drinks a half dose of a potion that bestows immortality, is only borderline mathematical fiction. The only arguably mathematical part... (more) |
|
|
Morte di un matematico napoletano (1992) |
|
| Mario Martone (director) |
|
"This movie describes the last day in [the] life of a
famous Italian mathematician: Renato Caccioppoli. He was a fascinating and
discussed person in Naples' political and cultural life. [A] member... (more) |
|
|
Mother's Milk (2005) |
|
| Andrew Thomas Breslin |
|
A lawyer takes on the dairy industry (with the aid of a quirky mathematician) in this witty SF satire.
My novel concerns a fictitious mathematical advance in meta-analysis of epidemiological data, allowing... (more) |
|
|
The Mouse and his Child (1967) |
|
| Russell Hoban |
|
Not really a kids book (too violent and depressing) nor an adult book
(about a toy mouse that goes on an adventure, with illustrations) this
is nonetheless an interesting allegory for those so inclined.... (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) |
|
|
Mozart on Morphine (1989) |
|
| Gregory Benford |
|
A mathematician nearly loses his life to appendicitis. While
sedated in the hospital, he describes the loony stuff that flits through his
head, and how it relates to the subjective and personal processes... (more) |
|
|
Mrs. Einstein (1998) |
|
| Anna McGrail |
|
It's a wonderful novel that invents a history for Einstein's illegitimate daughter, about whom little is known. In the novel, she's a mathematician who becomes obsessed with her father's refusal to acknowledge... (more) |
|
|
Mrs. Warren's Profession (1894) |
|
| George Bernard Shaw |
|
This is Shaw's notorious play about poverty and prostitution, the
"profession" of the title. (The play itself was not performed in
public in the UK until 1925.)
Mrs. Warren has made her fortune... (more) |
|
|
Ms Fnd in a Lbry (1961) |
|
| Hal Draper |
|
Hal Draper took a break from his life's work of promoting Marxism,
and wrote one science fiction story. The information explosion, and
associated storage and retrieval problems, is humorously examined
in... (more) |
|
|
Mulligan Stew (1979) |
|
| Gilbert Sorrentino |
|
An avant garde novel, or a parody of one, presented in the form of a collection of letters, notes, papers and other writings. Includes Cardano's formula, plus a full length parody of a mathematics research... (more) |
|
|
Murder at the Margin (1978) |
|
| Marshall Jevons |
|
This is the first of the Henry Spearman murder mysteries (the others
being THE FATAL EQUILIBRIUM and A DEADLY INDIFFERENCE--they can be read
in any order). These unusual murder mysteries star Harvard... (more) |
|
|
Murder, She Conjectured (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
A police psychologist attending a conference in Cambridge, England is pulled into an unsolved murder mystery by her mathematician boyfriend. An important theme of the story is the oppresive sexism that... (more) |
|
|
Musgrave Ritual (1893) |
|
| Sir Arthur Conan Doyle |
|
A tiny bit of mathematics is used by Sherlock Holmes
to solve this mystery. In it, he ties together the disappearance of a
housemaid, the discovery of the dead body of the chief butler and a strange
poem... (more) |
|
|
The Music of the Spheres (2001) |
|
| Elizabeth Redfern |
|
A highly praised (a la Caleb Carr) historical thriller set in Europe in
1795, involving lots of astronomy. This includes Laplace musing over his
theorem that gravitational perturbations are bounded, and his wondering
if a similar theorem applies to history.
(more) |
|
|
The Mystery of Khufu's Tomb (1935) |
|
| Mundy Talbot |
|
A rapid-read, reasonably entertaining novel about the real location of the Pharaoh Khufu’s (Cheops) tomb and the fabulous treasury buried therein. An old, Chinese mathematician spends decades decoding... (more) |
|
|
N Day (1943) |
|
| Philip Latham |
|
An astronomer's observations of the sun lead him to predict the sun will go nova in just a few days. The formula that he used for his prediction is included explicitly. "Philip Latham" is
the pseudonym of Robert Shirley Richardson.
(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 (1998) |
|
| Leonard Michaels |
|
An American mathematician attends a conference in Poland, the country in which his grandparents were killed in a Nazi concentration camp. This is during the Cold War, and the American consul warns him... (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) |
|
|
The Name of the Rose (1980) |
|
| Umberto Eco |
|
A mystery novel which takes place in a 14th Century monastery by the brilliant Italian author, Umberto Eco. This book only has a small amount of math in it, but I frequently receive recommendations to... (more) |
|
|
Nanunculus (1997) |
|
| Ian Watson |
|
A mathematician wishes to commit suicide, but is pestered by an automated visitor from the future programmed to make certain that the mathematician discovers the key to time travel before he does.
Appears in the collection The Great Escape
and first published in Interzone January 1997.
(more) |
|
|
Narrow Valley (1966) |
|
| R.A. Lafferty |
|
This is a madcap story about a tract of land which is topologically folded through a shamanic incantation. Contains descriptions of some physical effects but explicitly states that the topological defect... (more) |
|
|
Naturally (Double Whammy) (1954) |
|
| Fredric Brown |
|
Fredric Brown, a prolific and acclaimed writer of mystery
and science fiction stories and novels, was an extraordinary
master of the short-short. "Naturally" is a one-pager about
Henry... (more) |
|
|
The Nature of Smoke (1996) |
|
| Anne Harris |
|
Science fiction thriller combining genetic engineering and chaos theory.
The math is not presented in a way that conveys any real meaning to the
reader, but perhaps some feeling for the beauty of math... (more) |
|
|
Necroscope (Series) (1992) |
|
| Brian Lumley |
|
Harry Keogh is a "necroscope" who can communicate with the dead. So, when omens suggest that the Möbius strip and space-time are going to be relevant to his plans in the near future, he goes straight... (more) |
|
|
Nena's Math Force (2005) |
|
| Susan Jarema |
|
This picture book for children, which is available for free online and also in print, tells the story of a girl who is upset when her math teacher requires the class to do arithmetic without a calculator.... (more) |
|
|
Neverness (1988) |
|
| David Zindell |
|
"[In this book], the Order of Pilots tries to tackle the Continuum Hypothesis.
It's a long, strange, complex story, but it seems pretty certain that the
author
had some mathematical training. He tries... (more) |
|
|
A New Golden Age (1981) |
|
| Rudy Rucker |
|
In this story, and in our world as well, mathematicians lament the
fact that legislators cannot sufficiently appreciate mathematics and
that this adversely affects the funding of their science. To address
this... (more) |
|
|
The New Reality (1950) |
|
| Charles Leonard Harness |
|
The theme of this story concerns the idea that observation
determines reality, and takes it to a more profound level than
is usual in quantum mechanics. Along the way, the history of
π and of four-dimensionality are discussed.
First appeared in
THRILLING WONDER STORIES (1950),
reprinted in several anthologies,
including the author's THE ROSE.
(more) |
|
|
Newton's Gift (1979) |
|
| Paul J. Nahin |
|
Time traveller Wallace John Steinhope believes that he will be able to help
his hero, Isaac Newton, avoid the tedium of computation by bringing him an electronic
calculator that can do simple arithmetic.... (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) |
|
|
The Next Dimension (1947) |
|
| Vladimir Karapetoff |
|
"A Mathematical Play in Five Dialogs". Once again, we are treated to the
Flatland notion of two-dimensional creatures
pondering a "hypothetical" three dimensional existence. Many of the usual
concerns... (more) |
|
|
Nice Girl with Five Husbands (1951) |
|
| Fritz Leiber |
|
A man is unwittingly swept by a time wind 100 years
into the future. He and the people he meets in the
future--including the nice girl of the title--talk
at cross purposes, but no one realizes... (more) |
|
|
The Nine Billion Names of God (1953) |
|
| Arthur C. Clarke |
|
As much about computers as it is about mathematics, we join two
programmers hired by a Buddhist sect seeking to find all true names of
God by exhausting a combinatorial library of possibilities.
Appears... (more) |
|
|
The Nine Tailors (1934) |
|
| Dorothy Leigh Sayers |
|
This Lord Peter Wimsey novel is often considered Sayers' best. The plot revolves around the art of change ringing, often called "campanology" by non-campanologists. As usual with Sayers, she makes... (more) |
|
|
No One You Know (2008) |
|
| Michelle Richmond |
|
Having felt overshadowed by her mathematician older sister when she was alive, the main character becomes obsessed with her murder after the sister is killed. Using her sister's notebook describing her... (more) |
|
|
No Regrets (2007) |
|
| Shannon Butcher |
|
This is an espionage thriller in which a cryptographer reluctantly helps the military break a mathematical code. It gets high ratings from those who enjoy this sort of cloak-and-dagger stuff. Moreover,... (more) |
|
|
No-Sided Professor (1946) |
|
| Martin Gardner |
|
We all know that among the surprising things you learn when you first
make a Mobius strip is
the fact that out of a two sided piece of paper you can make an object
with only one side. Why should this... (more) |
|
|
The Non-Statistical Man (1956) |
|
| Raymond F. Jones |
|
In this short story, insurance adjuster Charles Bascomb comes up against his greatest enemy: intuition. The story presents mathematics (especially statistics and logic) as one way man can deal with reality.... (more) |
|
|
Not a Chance (2009) |
|
| Peter Haff |
|
A student harangues his physics professor about the possibility that all mathematical proofs are incorrect. His argument is based on the supposed uncertainty about the validity of proofs of the Four Color... (more) |
|
|
Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less (1976) |
|
| Jeffrey Archer |
|
A mathematics professor who lectures at Oxford on group theory is among four clever people who plot to get revenge on the con artist who duped them in this, the first novel by politician and now best-selling... (more) |
|
|
Notes from the Underground (1864) |
|
| Fyodor Dostoevsky |
|
Part I
involves an unnamed rather crazed and unreliable narrator
(generally known as "the Underground Man") raving and rambling
against life, the universe, and everything. A few... (more) |
|
|
Nothing but the Truth (and a few white lies) (2006) |
|
| Justina Chen Headley |
|
This is a novel for young adults about a half Asian teenager who is sent to a summer Math Camp at Stanford by her overprotective mother. She enjoys the camp more than she expected to, until her mother... (more) |
|
|
Null-P (1951) |
|
| William Tenn |
|
The story extrapolates to great lengths (including a complete overthrow of humanity by smartly evolved canines) a simple principle: what might happen if we found a perfectly average man who had quantitative... (more) |
|
|
NUMB3RS (2005) |
|
| Nick Falacci / Cheryl Heuton |
|
This TV crime drama (premiered January 2005) follows the adventures of a pair of brothers, one a mathematics professor and the other an FBI agent, as they combine forces to solve mysteries.
Cool effects... (more) |
|
|
Number 9: The Search for the Sigma Code (1998) |
|
| Cecil Balmond |
|
A young boy learns about mathematics while trying to solve a mathematical puzzle.
"As a teacher and Education Inspector in England I would rate
this book very highly. It is extremely well written... (more) |
|
|
The Number Devil (Der Zahlenteufel) (1997) |
|
| Hans Magnus Enzenberger |
|
"The title may be translated as The
Counting Devil, or maybe The Number Devil, and it has a subtitle that
translates to 'a pillowbook for everyone
who is afraid of math'. Enzensberger is a respected... (more) |
|
|
The Number of the Beast (1979) |
|
| Robert A. Heinlein |
|
Engineer and physicist Jacob Burroughs invents a time machine which lets
him travel to what we might consider "alternate universes". The underlying
mathematics involves the notion that there are in... (more) |
|
|
Numberland (1987) |
|
| George Weinberg |
|
The co-author (with John Schumaker) of STATISTICS: AN
INTUITIVE APPROACH, and practicing psychotherapist, tells
a charming little fable about Numberland.
Peace, harmony,... (more) |
|
|
Numbers (2009) |
|
| Dana Dane |
|
Hip Hop artist Dana Dane wrote this novel about a NYC youth with mathematical talent who gets caught up in a life of crime. There is no actual mathematics discussed. Rather, it appears in a few brief comments only to justify the protagonist's nickname of "Numbers" and presumably to convince us that he had the potential for a bright future under the right circumstances.
(more) |
|
|
Numbers Don't Lie (2005) |
|
| Terry Bisson |
|
This novel is actually just a compilation of three Wilson Wu short stories ("The Hole in the Hole", "The Edge of the Universe" and "Get Me to the Church on Time") which were previously published in Asimov's... (more) |
|
|
Numbers in the Dark (La notte dei numeri) (1990) |
|
| Italo Calvino |
|
A boy looking around the huge office building where his mother works meets an old accountant who now works with computers but reveals to him an undiscovered arithmetic error made back in one of the company's... (more) |
|
|
Nuremberg Joys (2000) |
|
| Charles Sheffield |
|
A mathematician is on trial for war crimes, regarding
his role in developing an absolutely horrendous killing
weapon based on sophisticated new physics. Guilt or
... (more) |
|
|
Nymphomation (2000) |
|
| Jeff Noon |
|
A math professor's theory of ``nymphomation'' (described in the book as a way for numbers to mate) is used to develop a lottery game called "Domino Bones" that entirely takes over the city of Manchester,... (more) |
|
|
The Object (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
This is a mathematical horror story, written by someone who doesn't like horror stories. Since I'm the author, I can honestly (and humbly) admit that the result is kind of weird.
The plot concerns... (more) |
|
|
Occam's Razor (1956) |
|
| David Duncan |
|
This story involves the concept of discontinuous time embedded in a sort of “Meta-Time”. Essentially, Duncan proposes the idea that True Reality evolves along Meta-Time which is broken up into smaller... (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) |
|
|
Odile (1937) |
|
| Raymond Queneau |
|
A humorous semi-autobiographical novel by this famous, French, surrealistic author.
Queneau seems to have had some training as a mathematician and was friends
with several leading French mathematicians.... (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) |
|
|
Off Day! (1953) |
|
| Al Feldstein (writer)/ Jack Kamen (artist) |
|
Believe it or not, this Weird Science story is essentially a lecture on the law of large numbers.
A very worried college professor tells his class he's just witnessed the failure of one of the most... (more) |
|
|
An Old Arithmetician (1885) |
|
| Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman |
|
The title character of this short story, which appeared in the September 1885 issue of Harper's Weekly, is an old, uneducated woman who loves computing (with chalk and slate):
You have always been very... (more) |
|
|
Old Faithful (1934) |
|
| Raymond Z. Gallun |
|
An extended discussion of the use of arithmetic in setting up a two-way communication code comprises the mathematical content of this forgotten classic SF short story.
Gallun (rhymes with balloon)... (more) |
|
|
Old Fillikin (1982) |
|
| Joan Aiken |
|
A farm boy who hates his math class seemingly calls upon his grandmother's "familiar" to get revenge on his teacher.
This reads like an old fashioned ghost story, but it is the kind where you can imagine... (more) |
|
|
On the marriage of Hermes and Philology (410) |
|
| Marianus Capella |
|
"A must in your data base is Martianus Capella (c. 410 A.D.), On the
marriage of Hermes and Philology (translated in english by W.H. Stahl,
Columbia University Press): Hermes is marrying a minor godess
Philology. The Seven Liberal Arts (including Arithmetic, Geometry,
Astronomy and Harmony) come to greet the couple and present themselves."
(more) |
|
|
On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction (2003) |
|
| Karl Iagnemma |
|
The title of the story was the title of a chapter in the Ph.D. thesis that Joseph, the main character, was working on...but never finished. Instead, he wound up living with his advisor's daughter, working... (more) |
|
|
|
|
One (1995) |
|
| George Alec Effinger |
|
Two interstellar searchers for alien life, after endless failures, must
confront what went wrong in their understanding of Drake's equation, the
famed formula that allegedly estimates the odds of interstellar... (more) |
|
|
The One Best Bet (1911) |
|
| Samuel Hopkins Adams |
|
The story is about an amateur detective who uses some elementary geometric triangulation to foil an assassination. The last paragraph is a great touch, “Why, Governor, you’re giving me too much credit.... (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) |
|
|
Operation Chaos / Operation Changeling (1969) |
|
| Poul Anderson |
|
Part of a series of stories about detectives who use magic and religion published in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine in the 1960s, Operation Changeling (later published in novelized form in Operation... (more) |
|
|
Oracle (2000) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
The protagonist, Robert Stoney is a british mathematician who worked on German codes during WW II, was greatly affected by the death of a close friend, and was later persecuted for his homosexuality. ... (more) |
|
|
The Ore Miner's Wife (2003) |
|
| Karl Iagnemma |
|
A miner who spends his spare time secretly working on geometry problems arouses the suspicions of his God fearing wife when she comes upon his cryptic writings and follows him to a meeting with a visiting... (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) |
|
|
Our Feynman Who Art in Heaven... (2007) |
|
| Paul Di Filippo |
|
A religious cult based on the Standard Model (of high energy physics)
has its headquarters in a tesseract.
This story, which is certainly more physical than mathematical, appears in the "Plumage from Pegasus" column in the February 2007 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction and is available for free at their website.
(more) |
|
|
Ouroboros (1997) |
|
| Geoffrey A. Landis |
|
The question of whether what we call "reality" could be nothing other than a simulation run on a computer gets a mathematically sophisticated treatment in this story. In addition to a vague reference... (more) |
|
|
Out of the Sun: A Novel (1996) |
|
| Robert Goddard |
|
Harry Barnett (first introduced in the novel Into the
Blue) investigates the circumstances that lead to
his son's accident. The son, 33 year old math genius, lies in a coma
and the accident is somehow... (more) |
|
|
The Oxford Murders (2004) |
|
| Guillermo Martinez |
|
A young, Argentinian mathematician visiting the UK is drawn into a murder mystery when his landlord (a woman who had worked as a code breaker during World War II) is killed. A clue and the words "The... (more) |
|
|
The Pacific Mystery (2006) |
|
| Stephen Baxter |
|
This starts as an alternate history short story, in which Lord Halifax became Prime Minister of England in 1940 and reaches an accommodation with Germany; Germany holds sway over Europe and Russia, Japan... (more) |
|
|
The Pacifist (1966) |
|
| Arthur C. Clarke |
|
Clarke, one of the all-time biggest names in serious science
fiction, took time to write a series of humorous science
fiction tall tales. The stories are narrated by one Harry
... (more) |
|
|
Panda Ray (1996) |
|
| Michael Kandel |
|
This science fiction novel is about a dysfunctional family of superbeings (aliens? mutants? humans from the future?) in modern America. It reminds me a bit of the writings of Stanislaw Lem, which is not... (more) |
|
|
The Papers of A.J. Wentworth, B.A. (1949) |
|
| Humphry Francis Ellis |
|
This is a humorous book about A J Wentworth, school master at a British school, who teaches Algebra to 11-13 year old children. The entire novel has a touch of Wodehouse to it as it follows the bumbling... (more) |
|
|
Papos (2007) |
|
| Alex Rose |
|
A short piece which mixes up historical facts/pseudo-facts from Greek history with rich imagination to discuss the discovery of irrational numbers (Pythagoras, Hippasus), the vanishing point in perspective... (more) |
|
|
Paradox (2000) |
|
| John Meaney |
|
Young Tom Corcorigan seems to represent the lowest "caste" in the extremely hierarchical human society of the year 3404. However, his mathematical abilities (he is able to figure out a way around Gödel's... (more) |
|
|
The Parrot's Theorem (2000) |
|
| Denis Guedj |
|
This is an ambitious novel, a magical fantasy about a talking parrot bought at a flea market in France who, with the help of the personal library of a reclusive mathematical genius, teaches some children... (more) |
|
|
Partition (2003) |
|
| Ira Hauptman |
|
This play about the interaction between the mathematicians Hardy and Ramanujan explores the "partitions" that differentiate the men from eachother (Hardy's mathematical rigor versus Ramanujan's intuitive... (more) |
|
|
Paul Bunyan versus the Conveyor Belt (1949) |
|
| William Hazlett Upson |
|
A clever "twist" on the usual Mobius band story.
Answers the age old question: How can you win lots of money betting
against poor saps who don't understand topology?
I use this story with children... (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 Song (2008) |
|
| Tina Chang |
|
This story by Tina Chang appears in the February 2008 issue of Math Horizons magazine and is also available on her blogsite (registration required). It uses a conversation between gods manipulating universes... (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) |
|
|
The Phantom of Kansas (1976) |
|
| John Varley |
|
A sublunar meteorological artist wakens from her memory
recording to learn that a serial killer has been murdering
her repeatedly, and is presumably still... (more) |
|
|
The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) |
|
| Norton Juster / Jules Feiffer (Illustrator) |
|
This "Alice in Wonderland"-esque children's book follows our hero,
Milo, to the fantasy world through his toy tollbooth. One of the
lands he visits is very "mathematical". We meet the dodecahedron,... (more) |
|
|
Phase IV (1974) |
|
| Mayo Simon (writer) / Saul Bass (director) |
|
A mathematician who `applied game theory to the language of killer whales' is brought in to help fight an attack by intelligent ants. (more) |
|
|
Pi (1998) |
|
| Darren Aronofsky (director) |
|
A mathematician discovers a new relationship between chaos theory and
the number Pi which makes him a target of a dangerous religious sect
and a greedy investor. The references to mathematics and its... (more) |
|
|
Pi in the Sky (1983) |
|
| Rudy Rucker |
|
The story is about a family which finds an alien artifact on a beach while on vacation: a smooth cone with patterns of stripes on its surface and which produces sound in the same pattern. It turns out... (more) |
|
|
The Pi Man (1959) |
|
| Alfred Bester |
|
I found this work in an anthology of Alfred Bester short stories "The Dark Side of the Earth". It is an ironic story of a man that calls himself the Pi Man (irrational) that tries to set a pattern... (more) |
|
|
A Piece of Justice (1995) |
|
| Jill Paton Walsh |
|
The mathematics of tilings and quilting play background roles in this mystery in which a graduate student attempts to write a biography of the (fictitious) mathematician Gideon Summerfield. Summerfield... (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) |
|
|
The Pikestaffe Case (1924) |
|
| Algernon Blackwood |
|
This quite unsatisfying yarn hangs its hat on the old idea of finding a way into a mirror to discover a new reality. The author waves his hands quite a bit to build an aura of mystery (by appealing... (more) |
|
|
The Planck Dive (1998) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
This short story describes a bizarre experiment in which researchers are cloned (quantum cloning, not the genetic kind; these researchers aren't "fleshers") and sent into a black hole. Their goal is to... (more) |
|
|
Planck Time (2004) |
|
| Michael Iwoleit |
|
The setting is 2036 to 2038. A 140-km long linear collider ("Super Large Hadron Collider") has been installed at one of the L5 points in earth orbit. Some unknown technology must have been discovered... (more) |
|
|
Planck Zero (1992) |
|
| Stephen Baxter |
|
Baxter's hard-SF ideas are often quite stunning in their scope and creativity. "Planck Zero" is no exception to this. An advanced species of aliens - the Ghosts - have started conducting experiments... (more) |
|
|
Plane People (1933) |
|
| Wallace West |
|
A space-operatic story which implements Edwin Abbott's world of Flatland. A perfectly flat comet strikes earth at a glancing angle and sheers off a very small part, including a few people, who discover... (more) |
|
|
|
|
The Plattner Story (1896) |
|
| Herbert George Wells |
|
Gottfrieb Plattner disappears after an explosion for nine days.
Upon return, he recounts a strange tale of a parallel world.
More mathematically interesting, he discovers that he is now
left-handed,... (more) |
|
|
The Poison Master (2003) |
|
| Liz Williams |
|
This is one of those fantasy novels in which mathematics and magic are intertwined. As usual, it is nice to see mathematics portrayed as being simultaneously powerful and beautiful...but there isn't much... (more) |
|
|
Pop Quiz (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
An algebraic geometer is called in when messages from an alien spacecraft appear to be asking questions about projective varieties. Though it may at first appear to be another "mathematics as a common... (more) |
|
|
PopCo (2004) |
|
| Scarlett Thomas |
|
Alice was raised by her grandparents, a mathematician and a cryptographer, and now uses what she learned from them to make mathematical puzzles for children. Her employer, the giant toy company "PopCo",... (more) |
|
|
Post-Bombum [aka Post-Boomboom] (1967) |
|
| Alberto Vanasco |
|
Argentinian author and math professor Alberto Vanasco wrote this short story about post-apocalyptic survivors trying to record keys to civilization, and failing miserably. (Thanks to Vijay Fafat for bringing... (more) |
|
|
The Power of Words (1845) |
|
| Edgar Allan Poe |
|
A very short work (two-pages long!) in
which two angels discuss the divine implications of our ability to
mathematically determine the future consequences of an action, especially
wave propagation.... (more) |
|
|
Powerball 310 (2007) |
|
| K.T. Reid |
|
The premise of this amusing crime caper is a gang of experts who pull of a successful theft of a $310 million Powerball lottery jackpot by generating a winning ticket just after the numbers have been... (more) |
|
|
The Pre-Persons (1974) |
|
| Philip K. Dick |
|
His nastiest story, a deeply felt response to Roe vs Wade. Dick imagines a future where Congress has decided that abortion
is legal until the soul enters the body, which is specified as
... (more) |
|
|
PreVision (1936) |
|
| John Pierce |
|
The story hangs its hat on a clever observation made long ago by many physicists, including Einstein, about the nature of solutions of Maxwell's equations. Since the equations are time-symmetric, they... (more) |
|
|
Prince of Mathematics: Carl Friedrich Gauss (2006) |
|
| Margaret B.W. Tent |
|
A fictionalized account of the life and achievements of one of history's greatest mathematicians, told in a style which is appropriate for children but also maintains the interest of adult readers.
(I'm... (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) |
|
|
Probability Storm (1977) |
|
| Julian Reid |
|
Julian Reid takes the concept of statistical anomalies to a fantastic extreme in a slapstick fantasy comedy written in a very witty and conversational style, replete with puns and smart-cracks. A tavern... (more) |
|
|
The Problem of Cell 13 (1907) |
|
| Jacques Futrelle |
|
"The story which introduces Professor S. F. X. van Dusen,
professional scientific supergenius, who lends his talents
to solving baffling mysteries. He is described as primarily
... (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) |
|
|
Professor and Colonel (1987) |
|
| Ruth Berman |
|
In this unusual story, we get to see another side to Sherlock Holmes' arch enemy, the brilliant but evil mathematician Professor Moriarty. Here, rather than perpetrating a crime, Moriarty is merely visiting with his brother, discussing the significance of his research into asteroid dynamics. (See also Asimov's take on this same subject.) (more) |
|
|
Professor Conundrum Mysteries! (2008) |
|
| Bill Streifer |
|
My book, Professor Conundrum Mysteries!...combines math education (non-fiction) and historical fiction.
The book consists of five stories that take place during important events in 20th century U.S.... (more) |
|
|
Professor Morgan's Moon (1899) |
|
| Stanley Waterloo |
|
A young mathematician asks for the hand of a senior mathematician's beautiful (and clever) daughter, but is refused on the grounds that his inability to support her financially was a mathematical certainty.... (more) |
|
|
Progress (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
The mathematics of ancient Egypt can look very strange to us today. For example, although they did not have many fractions, they did know about the number 2/3. Strangely, however, it took a page of computation... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
A Proof of God (2004) |
|
| Colin Adams |
|
A mathematician is approached by a seemingly crazy old man who claims to have a proof of the existence of God, but later it seems that he might not be so crazy after all in this hilarious spoof from Adams'... (more) |
|
|
Properties of Light (2000) |
|
| Rebecca Goldstein |
|
This is a beautifully written novel about a theoretical physicist who
hates the daughter of a more senior physicist whose work he
admires. The real plot of the novel revolves around why he hates her,... (more) |
|
|
Psychohistorical Crisis (2001) |
|
| Donald Kingsbury |
|
In the far future, a group of "psychohistorians" controls the fate of humanity using the mathematical theory of "the founder" in this unauthorized "sequel" to Asimov's Foundation series. Kingsbury's lengthy... (more) |
|
|
The Purloined Letter (1845) |
|
| Edgar Allan Poe |
|
"This is the third and last C. Auguste Dupin mystery. The
Prefect of Paris police explains a very delicate situation
to Dupin, involving a royal letter whose possession grants
its bearer great... (more) |
|
|
Pyramids (2001) |
|
| Terry Pratchett |
|
Thanks to Aaron Gullison for pointing out that in this Discworld novel, "the camels are all mathematicians, and think in math." For instance,
The greatest mathematician alive on the Disc, and in fact... (more) |
|
|
Pythagoras' Revenge: A Mathematical Mystery (2009) |
|
| Arturo Sangalli |
|
Freelance science journalist Sangalli has written a book which presents some historical information about Pythagoras and his beliefs in the form of a novel of the detail driven conspiracy theory adventure... (more) |
|
|
Pythagoras's Darkest Hour (2007) |
|
| Colin Adams |
|
A humorous short story from the author of Mathematically Bent which tells the true story of the discovery of the Pythagorean Theorem. Well, actually, perhaps it isn't exactly true...but it is so good,... (more) |
|
|
Pythagorean Crimes (2006) |
|
| Tefcros Michaelides |
|
This murder mystery takes place amid the exciting developments occurring in the mathematical and artistic communities in Europe between 1900 and 1931. Much of what one will learn by reading this book... (more) |
|
|
Q.E.D. (1984) |
|
| Bruce Stanley Burdick |
|
The "Q.E.D." from the title of this short story published in Analog
(volume 104 #12, December 1984, pp. 96-112) is the latin expression "quod
erat demonstratum" that is meant to conclude a proof and... (more) |
|
|
Quanto scommettiamo ("How much do you want to bet?") (1965) |
|
| Italo Calvino |
|
The story is about two beings, living since the beginning of the universe (one of them, the protagonist of the book, is "old Qfwfq" - it's not a misprint -, a mysterious being that claims to have witnessed... (more) |
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Quarantine (1977) |
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| Arthur C. Clarke |
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For safety's sake, all organic life on the planet Earth has been
wiped out by automatic defenses. The investigator looking into
this regrettable turn of affairs in an otherwise promising species
discovers... (more) |
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Quicksilver: The Baroque Cycle Volume 1 (2003) |
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| Neal Stephenson |
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This long novel from the author of Cryptonomicon does for 17th Century mathematics what that earlier novel did for the 20th century. Namely, it deifies some great historical mathematicians (this time... (more) |
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The Ragged Astronauts (1987) |
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| Bob Shaw |
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The novel is set in an alternate universe where two planets orbit each other in close proximity, with a common atmosphere. The civilization on one of the planets is shown to be similar to the western... (more) |
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Rama II (1989) |
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| Arthur C. Clarke /Gentry Lee |
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This is the sequel to the novel Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke.
Short Summary:
The huge cylindrical Rama spaceship has returned 70 years after it
arrived near Earth for the first time.... (more) |
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The Rapture of the Nerds (2004) |
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| Cory Doctorow / Charles Stross |
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This story is set in Stross's "Accelerando" series,
due for publication in novel form in 2005, offering
a worm's eye view of the "Vinge singularity", the
supposed moment in the coming decades... (more) |
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Ratner's Star (1976) |
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| Don DeLillo |
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Billy Terwilliger (aka Twillig) is not your typical 14 year old boy.
True, he is beginning to get interested in sex and thinks that the
word "fart" is entertaining, but he is also a number theorist and... (more) |
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Reading by Numbers (2009) |
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| Aidan Doyle |
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Elementary number theory and some superstitious numerology underlie this story, which appeared in the November 11, 2009 issue of the online Fantasy Magazine (though I would never describe this story as... (more) |
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Reality Conditions (2005) |
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| Alex Kasman |
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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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Reality Conditions: short mathematical fiction (2005) |
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| Alex Kasman |
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The stories in this collection of 16 original short works of mathematical fiction are different from each other in many ways: some are serious and some funny, some are realistic and some fantastical,... (more) |
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Recess (Episode: A Genius Among Us) (2000) |
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| Brian Hamill |
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This episode of Disney's Saturday Morning cartoon "Recess" is clearly a parody of the film "Good Will Hunting". I hope this doesn't lower anyone's opinion of me...but I personally liked it better than... (more) |
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Red Zen (2007) |
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| Jason Earls |
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A man travels to another planet in an attemp to resolve a bizarre memory problem in this absurdist science fiction novel. As in his other works, Earls includes tidbits of computational number theory.... (more) |
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Refund (1938) |
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| Fritz Karinthy (original) / Percival Wilde (English Adaptation) |
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A former student demands that his tuition be refunded because he feels his education was worthless, but loses his bid when he is tricked by the mathematics master.
This entry refers to the 1938 adaptation... (more) |
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Regarding Roderer (1994) |
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| Guillermo Martinez |
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A short novel about Gustavo Roderer, a brilliant but troubled young man in Argentina. Mathematics is not a central theme, but arises as Roderer's friend (the narrator) talks with him about the philosophical... (more) |
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The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes (1895) |
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| Herbert George Wells |
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Rather than seeing what is actually around him in England, Davidson sees
events occurring on a rock off of the Antipodes Island. The explanation
offered includes the notion of non-flat geometries for... (more) |
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Report from the Ambassador to Cida-2 (2008) |
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| Clifton Cunningham |
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The human selected to communicate with the aquatic aliens of Cida-2 is surprised to learn that their number system differs from our own. In particular, although our communication with the extra-terrestrials... (more) |
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Resolution (2006) |
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| John Meaney |
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This is the third and apparently final novel in the Nulapeiron sequence. In the first two we see Tom use his skills at fighting and mathematics (called "logosophy" in the book) as well as knowledge gained... (more) |
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Return from the Stars (1961) |
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| Stanislaw Lem |
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This book contains some of the
most realistic sounding fictional mathematics I have ever read, as
well as some very high praise for mathematics (from a fictional
character). In this book, an astronaut... (more) |
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The Return of Moriarty (1974) |
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| John Gardner |
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The British spy thriller novelist, perhaps now best known
for his 007 novels, wrote three novels starring Professor
Moriarty, THE RETURN OF MORIARTY (UK title MORIARTY),
THE REVENGE OF MORIARTY... (more) |
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Ripples in the Dirac Sea (1988) |
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| Geoffrey A. Landis |
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A time machine story based on a combination of Hilbert's Hotel analogy and the "Fermi Sea". We read of the travels of the main character to the ancient past, to the San Francisco earthquake and to the... (more) |
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A Rite of Spring (1977) |
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| Fritz Leiber |
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Leiber has stretched out a very flimsy story line into a 50-page trivia-fest on the number seven. A genius of a mathematician yearns for his childhood ability to visualize and play with mathematics as... (more) |
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River of Gods (2006) |
|
| Ian McDonald |
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A science fiction novel about artificial intelligence, politics, cellular automata, climate change and alternate universes that takes place in India of 2047. Math plays only a very small role in this... (more) |
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Robbins v. New York (2008) |
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| Colin Adams |
|
The author of the Mathematical Intelligencer's "Mathematically Bent" column has a talent for making me laugh, and this piece which has the US Supreme Court justices debating higher math and modern physics... (more) |
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The Rock (1996) |
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| Robert Doherty |
|
"Five people--including an Australian Air Force computer operator, a Mexican engineering professor, a New York housewife, a Colombian Special Forces officer, and an English mathematician--are invited to... (more) |
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The Rolling Stones (1952) |
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| Robert A. Heinlein |
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The Stone family goes off on a working tour across the solar system.
As a condition for going, the father insists the twins keep up with
their higher mathematics studies, which gets referred to explicitly
several times. The difference between arithmetic and geometric growth
is commented on when their pet "flat cat" reproduces 8 at a time, and
faster than expected.
(more) |
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Rooster: An American Tragedy (2000) |
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| Brian Fielding |
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A gifted artist suffering from leprosy encounters Tamara Browne, a quirky
former math grad student who is interested in "humanistic mathematics".
"While this book is not based on mathematics, it... (more) |
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The Rose Acacia |
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| Ralph P. Boas, Jr. |
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"A computer makes a deal with the devil, with the
usual escape clause: if it can ask a question the devil cannot answer, the
computer gets the information for free. As the devil puts it, no logical
paradoxes,... (more) |
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Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead (1967) |
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| Tom Stoppard |
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This brilliant, weird play, retelling the story of Shakespeare's Hamlet
from the point of view of two "throw away" characters, unfortunately has
very little mathematics in it. However, every few days... (more) |
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Rough Strife (1980) |
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| Lynne Sharon Schwartz |
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This is the story of the courtship, marriage and affairs of Ivan (who works on the business side of the art world) and Caroline (a math professor).
Although there are plenty of clues to the knowledgeable... (more) |
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Round the Moon (1870) |
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| Jules Verne |
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This early science fiction novel about space travel (published originally in French, of course) contains two chapters with explicit (and very nice) mathematical content.
In Chapter 4 (A Little Algebra)... (more) |
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Rucker - A Life Fractal by Eli Halberstam (1991) |
|
| John Allen Paulos |
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Like Lem's De Impossibilitate Vitae and Prognoscendi , this is a work of fiction that takes the form of a book review. (As Paulos explains in his introduction, "Reviewing [a] book which hasn't been written... (more) |
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Rumpled Stiltskin (2004) |
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| Colin Adams |
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Do you remember the old Fractured Fairy Tales segment on Rocky and Bullwinkle in which classic stories were updated with a twist? This is just like those. The old Grimm's Brother tale is retold, but... (more) |
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Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz (1997) |
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| Irene Dische |
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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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San (2000) |
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| Lan Samantha Chang |
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A short story in the collection "Hunger" about a girl who becomes interested in mathematics (especially probability) when her gambler father deserts his family. She does not succeed as a college student and learns in the end that in both math and life, it is the mysteries (and not their solutions) which are of real interest.
(more) |
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The Sand-Reckoner (2000) |
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| Gillian Bradshaw |
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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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Schild's Ladder (2002) |
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| Greg Egan |
|
Far in the future, the mathematical theory of "quantum graph theory" is the theory of
physics. Unlike the current theories of relativity and quantum physics,
which are obviously approximations that... (more) |
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