 |
36 Arguments for the Existence of God (2010) |
 | Rebecca Goldstein |
|
This new novel by Rebecca Goldstein, whose Strange Attractors is one of my favorite works of mathematical fiction, features as two main characters a woman known as "the goddess of game theory" and a Hasidic... (more) |
|
 |
The Adventures of a University Math Professor (2001) |
 | Donald A. Buckeye |
|
This slim book is a very easy, unassuming, pleasant read which adults and sixth graders can both read with joy. It is an autobiographical fictionalization of some parts of a mathematics teacher’s life.... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Arnold Proof (2002) |
|
| Jessica Francis Kane |
|
This short story begins with a quote from Philip E.B. Jourdain's essay "The Nature of Mathematics". In the quote, he explains how in the process of carrying out a complicated computation, one may want... (more) |
|
|
The Axiom of Choice (2011) |
|
| David W. Goldman |
|
A ``choose-your-own-adventure'' story about a guitarist who must face the consequences of his decision to take a plane ride that ended in disaster. A brief but very nice discussion of The Axiom of Choice... (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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 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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Clockwork Rocket (2011) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
"The Clockwork Rocket" by Greg Egan is the first in his Orthogonal trilogy. As usual the author is very committed with the writing and goes the extra mile (or miles in this case) in order to achieve... (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) |
|
|
Continuity (1999) |
|
| Buzz Mauro |
|
This short story cleverly uses the δ-ε definition of continuity of a function to discuss the changing self-esteem of a character over time. After briefly recalling the rigorous definition, it introduces... (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) |
|
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|
|
The Countable (2011) |
|
| Ken Liu |
|
An autistic boy finds comfort in Cantor's discovery that the set of fractions is greatly outnumbered by the set of irrationals. (See, for example, Cantor's Diagonal Argument.)
I did not much enjoy... (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) |
|
|
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 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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Devotion of Suspect X [Yôgisha X no kenshin] (2005) |
|
| Keigo Higashino |
|
Reclusive high school math teacher Tetsuya Ishigami is "devoted" to two things: his math research and his neighbor, Yasuko Hanaoka. When Hanaoka and her daughter kill her abusive ex-husband, they are... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Disciple of the Masses (2008) |
|
| Xujun Eberlein |
|
A pathos-filled short story set in rural China toward the end of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. It captures beautifully the sense of loss inherent in a centrally-directed and enforced revolution, with... (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Einstein Enigma (2010) |
|
| José Rodrigues Dos Santos |
|
An adventure novel whose MacGuffin is a proof of the existence of God, formulated and hidden by Albert Einstein. There is more talk than action, which may disappoint some readers.
For those interested... (more) |
|
|
The Elusive Chauffeur (2008) |
|
| David H. Brown |
|
This mystery novel appears to have been conceived as a means for the author to "spread the word" about two things that are important to him: mathematics and his Christian faith. In it, a private detective... (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) |
|
|
Evil Genius (2005) |
|
| Catherine Jinks |
|
I am pleased to report that the titular "evil genius" in this children's novel is not the stereotypical cold mathematician in so many other works of mathematical fiction. In fact, the title character... (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) |
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|
|
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) |
|
|
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 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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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 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) |
|
|
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 "Win by Losing" is based on (more) |
|
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|
|
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) |
|
|
Gospel Truths (2007) |
|
| J.G. Sandom |
|
Another novel in the same genre as The Da Vinci Code – an Earth-shaking secret which can destroy the Roman Catholic Church (as a character says, “Can you imagine the headline? ‘Christ found to... (more) |
|
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|
|
The Hollow Man (1993) |
|
| Dan Simmons |
|
A psychic mathematician is driven to the edge of insanity as his life partner approaches death. The mathematician's research is described explicitly -- as are some of the horrific events that befall... (more) |
|
|
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Infinities (2010) |
|
| Vandana Singh |
|
A nicely written story about Abdul Karim, a mathematics teacher at the local municipal school, set against the backdrop of the religious turmoil between Hindus and Muslims in India. I couldn’t quite... (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) |
|
|
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 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) |
|
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|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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 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) |
|
|
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 Last Theorem (2008) |
|
| Buzz Mauro |
|
A depressed music professor ponders Fermat's Last Theorem and the implications of its proof by Andrew Wiles.
Like many of Mauro's other stories, this one is very well written, focusing not so much on... (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) |
|
|
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.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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Lucy and David and the God Equation (2011) |
|
| Alan McKenzie |
|
Lucy, a freshman at a Scottish University, and David, the graduate student who leads the problem sessions for her physics class, discuss the mathematical and philosophical implications of Gödel's First... (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 Squares (1977) |
|
| Paul Calter |
|
A very unconventionally written mystery story full of well placed and well-integrated problems in mathematics, which makes this a great book to be included in a course on ‘mathematics in literature’.... (more) |
|
|
Math Girls (2007) |
|
| Hiroshi Yuki |
|
Three high school friends work through some difficult mathematical ideas in this book, recently translated into English from the Japanese original.
The author is apparently well known in Japan for his... (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) |
|
|
|
|
The Mathematics of Nina Gluckstein (1985) |
|
| Esther Vilar |
|
When Argentina's most famous singer dies in an accident during a concert, his unpopular wife, Nina Gluckstein, commits suicide. Yet, since public opinion of her was so low (and perhaps because she was... (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Number Devil (Der Zahlenteufel) (1997) |
|
| Hans Magnus Enzensberger |
|
"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) |
|
|
|
|
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 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) |
|
|
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 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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
|
|
Der Rechenmeister [aka The Mathematician] (1999) |
|
| Dieter Jörgensen |
|
When I browsed through your list I found one book missing that I have in my library: "Der Rechenmeister" by Dieter Jörgensen is a novel describing the life of Niccolo Tartaglia in Venice and his battle... (more) |
|
|
Report from the Ambassador to Cida-2 (2008) |
|
| Clifton Cunningham |
|
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) |
|
|
Ripples in the Dirac Sea (1988) |
|
| Geoffrey A. Landis |
|
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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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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Schild's Ladder (2002) |
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| Greg Egan |
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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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The Shackles of Conviction (2008) |
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| James R. Meyer |
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This novel intersperses a fictionalized account of the life of Kurt Gödel with the modern tale of an engineer who realizes (and eventually convinces the world) that Gödel's proof was flawed and that his (more) |
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Singleton (2002) |
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| Greg Egan |
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This story involves a physicist and a mathematician who have a child -- well, sort of -- that they have specially designed to remain in a "classical" state (as opposed to a quantum superposition of states)... (more) |
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Sophie's Diary (2004) |
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| Dora Musielak |
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Sophie Germain famously studied mathematics at night by candlelight despite her parents' insistence that she give up this unfeminine discipline. She then went on to become one of the great mathematician's... (more) |
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Thirteen Diamonds (2000) |
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| Alan Cook |
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A murder mystery set in a retirement community in Chapel Hill, NC. During a bridge game at the club, one of the members, a Nobel-laureate in Economics, keels over and dies after receiving a perfect hand... (more) |
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Three Cornered Wheel (1963) |
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| Poul Anderson |
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Sometimes a surprising mathematical fact will inspire a science fiction story to illustrate it. I suspect that is what happened with this story that comes up with a contrived circumstance in which the... (more) |
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Three Days in Karlikania (1964) |
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| Vladimir Levshin |
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A children's fantasy novel written in Russian. I have not been able to find much about it but Rob Milson says:
Three children travel to Karlikania, an enchanted land populated by numerals. Here they... (more) |
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Topsy-turvy (Sans Dessus Dessous) (1889) |
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| Jules Verne |
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The members of the Gun Club want to use a giant cannon's recoil to change the Earth's rotation axis, so they can exploit the presumed coalfields at the North Pole. An unfortunate side effect is that... (more) |
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Turing (A Novel About Computation) (2003) |
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| Christos Papadimitriou |
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The four vertices of an unlikely love "rectangle" are (a) a dying, maverick cryptographer, (b) a pregnant Internet wiz, (c) a romantic middle-aged Greek archaeologist and (d) Turing, an artificially intelligent... (more) |
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Twenty-seven Uses for Imaginary Numbers (2009) |
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| Buzz Mauro |
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A teenage boy's discovery of the joys of Euler's formula coincides with the awakening of his homosexual desires. The author's mathematical understanding is very good, and the story reminded me of young... (more) |
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The Unknowns: A Mystery (2009) |
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| Benedict Carey |
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A novel for middle school children which aims to teach mathematical concepts as the young protagonists try to solve the mystery of the disappearances in their neighborhood.
I thoroughly enjoyed the... (more) |
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Wang's Carpets (1995) |
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| Greg Egan |
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This short story about a life form based on Wang Tiles first appeared in 1995 in Greg Bear's New Legends collection but was later expanded into an entire novel. For more information, see my entry on the novel that grew out of it, Egan's Diaspora.
(more) |
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White Light, or What is Cantor's Continuum Problem? (1980) |
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| Rudy Rucker |
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I think the best description of this book is Naked Lunch
meets The Wild Numbers, with a cameo appearance by
Donald Duck's nephews. Happily, this book has recently been rereleased
(2001) in a new format... (more) |
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Who Killed the Duke of Densmore? (1994) |
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| Claude Berge |
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The murder mystery in the title took
place many years ago and the only witnesses are a group of women who each
visited the crime scene for a single stretch of time. They each remember
whom they met... (more) |
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