a list compiled by Alex Kasman (College of Charleston)

Resources

Click on the links above to access my database listing individual works of fiction that are mathematical. Below, however, is a list of articles about mathematical fiction which you may also find interesting or helpful.

Women in Mathematical Fiction is an article I wrote for the Association of Women in Mathematics that appeared in their January 2011 issue.

Mathematics in Fiction: An Interdisciplinary Course is an article I wrote describing the class I taught for the Honors College here at the College of Charleston. This article appeared in the journal PRIMUS (Volume XIII Number 1, March 2003, Pages 1-16).

An article I wrote offers a "whirl-wind" tour of mathematics in science fiction. The article was published in the April 2004 issue of Math Horizons and is available here as a PDF file.

The Notices of the American Mathematical Society published my editorial (November 2011, p. 1407) arguing that more mathematicians should pay attention to mathematics in fiction. You can read it here.

The Society of Actuaries runs an annual fiction contest (see here). If only they were professionally published, I'd include them in the Mathematical Fiction database. In any case, you should certainly take a look at some of these enjoyable and mathematical (from an applied statistics perspective) stories.

I wrote a survey of fictional mathematics which appears in Mathematics in Popular Culture (edited by Jess and Elizabeth Sklar). The basic idea of the article is to consider and classify only those works of fiction containing discussions of imaginary mathematical results. In fact, there are not that many such works of fiction, since most mathematical fiction either includes only discussions of real mathematics or avoids any detailed discussion of math all together. So, I found I was able to really consider and compare most if not all of the interesting examples at once.

Keith Devlin's November 1998 essay "Math Becomes Way Cool" discusses the recent success of math in the movies.

Tel Aviv University professor Leo Corry has posted an article he wrote about acceptable levels of inaccuracy in mathematical fiction, which focuses especially on Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture and Partition.

Use this link to read David Folwer's article Mathematics as Science Fiction which appeared in World Literature Today (May-June 2010).

BTW There seem to be several Websites out there which list "math in the movies". There is some overlap between my database and what they present, but since we have different criteria it is not exactly the same. Please check out:

The Mathematical Movie Database at QEDCat.com. (Note added August 2012: Polster and Ross, who maintain that website, now have compiled the information into a book that is available from Johns Hopkins University Press. I know I'm ordering a copy for myself, and mention it in case you might want one, too.)
Oliver Knill's Mathematics in Movies page
Arnold G. Reinhold's The Math in the Movies page
Brian Harbourne's Math Movie Picks