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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) |
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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." (Contributed by William E. Emba.)
(more) |
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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) |
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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) |
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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) |
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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) |
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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) |
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Case of Lies (2005) |
|
| Perri O'Shaughnessy |
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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) |
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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) |
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Conceiving Ada (1997) |
|
| Lynn Hershman-Leeson
|
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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) |
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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) |
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Cryptology (2003) |
|
| Leonard Michaels |
|
You know how The New Yorker likes to publish vaguely bizarre short
stories that happen to take place in New York City? You know how lots of
authors who want to show a character who is afraid of "real... (more) |
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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) |
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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) |
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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) |
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Dark as Day (2002) |
|
| Charles Sheffield |
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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) |
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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) |
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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) |
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Enigma (1995) |
|
| Robert Harris / Tom Stoppard |
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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) |
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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) |
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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) |
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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) |
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False Witness (2007) |
|
| Randy D. Singer |
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An espionage novel (with an embedded Christian religious message) about a mathematician's decryption algorithm with the potential to disrupt internet security.
(more) |
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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) |
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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) |
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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) |
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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) |
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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) |
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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) |
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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) |
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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) |
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The Ingenious Mr. Spinola (1924) |
|
| Ernest Bramah |
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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) |
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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) |
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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) |
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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) |
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The Last Enemy (2008) |
|
| Peter Berry (Screenplay) / Iain B. MacDonald (Director) |
|
BBC TV series featuring an anti-social mathematician showing signs of obsessive compulsive disorder who discovers and takes down an evil government plot in the dystopian near future. I have not yet... (more) |
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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) |
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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) |
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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) |
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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) |
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A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (2006) |
|
| Janna Levin
|
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This novel about Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel contains much that has already been said many times before, and occasionally "tries too hard" artistically. Still I very much enjoyed reading it, and even... (more) |
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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) |
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Mefisto: A Novel (1986) |
|
| John Banville |
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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) |
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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) |
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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) |
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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) |
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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) |
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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) |
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Old Faithful (1934) |
|
| Raymond Z. Gallun |
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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) |
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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) |
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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) |
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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) |
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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) |
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PopCo (2004) |
|
| Scarlett Thomas |
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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) |
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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) |
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Quarantine (1977) |
|
| Arthur C. Clarke |
|
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) |
|
| Neal Stephenson |
|
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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River of Gods (2006) |
|
| Ian McDonald |
|
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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The Rose Acacia |
|
| Ralph P. Boas, Jr. |
|
"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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Sebastian (1968) |
|
| David Greene (director) |
|
A film about a British mathematician trying to break the German codes during World War II. (So, add this to the growing list of works of mathematical fiction inspired by Alan Turing!) I must admit that I have not yet seen the film, but you've got to love its tagline:
We can't tell you what he does (it's an international secret) but he does it with 100 girls... and does it the best!
(more) |
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Sekret Enigmy (1979) |
|
| Roman Wionczek
|
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Although Alan Turing tends to get much of the credit for breaking the Nazi "Enigma" codes during World War II, three Polish mathematicians did preliminary work that was equally brilliant and equally important. This film tells their story, featuring some real acts of heroism.
(more) |
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Shooting the Sun (2004) |
|
| Max Byrd |
|
Historical mathematicians Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage play supporting roles in this novel about an expedition into uncharted Indian territory to capture the first photograph of a solar eclipse at... (more) |
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Signal to Noise (1999) |
|
| Eric S. Nylund |
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The protagonist in this science fiction novel, Jack Potter, is a tenure track math professor in a future where San Francisco has sunk under the ocean, all non-academic employment in the United States... (more) |
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Simple Genius (2007) |
|
| David Baldacci |
|
A small child with an inexplicable ability to factor large numbers threatens the security of the Western world in this political thriller from popular author Baldacci. Although it is nice to see mathematics... (more) |
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Sneakers (1992) |
|
| Phil Alden Robinson (director) |
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Complex espionage story, more about computers than mathematics.
However, mathematics is clearly an underlying theme and in one scene
the mysterious mathematician Gunter Janek lectures on mathematical
aspects... (more) |
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Souls in the Great Machine (1999) |
|
| Sean McMullen |
|
Souls in the Great Machine is apparently a
post-ecological-apocalypse SF novel in which a powerful
multiprocessing computer is built out of human beings manipulating
abaci. Has anyone out there read... (more) |
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The Tale of the Big Computer (aka The End of Man?) (1966) |
|
| Hannes Alfven (writing as Olof Johannesson) |
|
"Alfven, the Swedish physicist and astrophysicist who was
awarded the Nobel prize for his development of plasma physics
and magnetohydrodynamics (but is perhaps better remembered
... (more) |
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Transition Dreams (1993) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
Transition dreams, an old man learns in this story, are dreams that your new, robotic brain has as it is being "filled up" with the patterns copied from your old, organic brain. There is a good deal of... (more) |
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Turing (A Novel About Computation) (2003) |
|
| Christos Papadimitriou |
|
A history of mathematics (from the point of view of computer science), as told by an artificially intelligent computer program named Turing to a lovelorn archaeologist.
The author, a computer science... (more) |
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Villages (2004) |
|
| John Updike |
|
The protagonist of this novel is Owen Mackenzie, a character who earned a degree in mathematics in the 1950's and went on to work with computers. His first lover, as well, was a mathematician. They... (more) |
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The Visiting Professor (1994) |
|
| Robert Littell |
|
Lemuel Falk, a ``randomnist'' from the Steklov Institute in Russia
gets a visiting position at a chaos research institute in Upstate New
York in this academic farce. He meets a drunkard who studies... (more) |
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