MATHEMATICAL FICTION:

a list compiled by Alex Kasman (College of Charleston)

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Crunch (2003)
John Gould
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Contributed by Vijay Fafat

A short story in which a man tries to explain to his son, Barry, the relative sizes of things when the child happens to ask, “How small is in-fin-ite-ly small?”. So father and son start exploring the idea of large numbers and the counting process and naturally arrive at infinity. As the father puts it, “Infinity isn't a concept I run into often, myself, in my world with the government. Billion dollar and trillion dollar dents are routine but what would an infinite amount of debt look like, exactly?”. From there, they flip the thinking process to discuss smaller and smaller sizes, using the analogy of cutting any given object in progressive halves forever (As they discuss this and the related concept of the universe collapsing in a big crunch into an infinitesimal dot, the son asks the inevitable existential question — what banged in the Big Bang?

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Works Similar to Crunch
According to my `secret formula', the following works of mathematical fiction are similar to this one:
  1. The Whisper of Disks by John Meaney
  2. Diamond Dogs by Alastair Reynolds
  3. i by Paul Evanby
  4. Mine the Primes by Julian Todd
  5. Letters From Incompleteness by Jonah Howell
  6. The Monty Hall Problem by Rebekah Bergman
  7. Final Integer by Thomas Reed Willemain
  8. The Girl Who Loved Mathematics by Elizabeth Smithers
  9. The Decimal People by Zachary Shiffman
  10. iPhone SE by Weike Wang
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Categories:
Genre
Motif
TopicInfinity,
MediumShort Stories,

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Exciting News: The 1,600th entry was recently added to this database of mathematical fiction! Also, for those of you interested in non-fictional math books let me (shamelessly) plug the recent release of the second edition of my soliton theory textbook.

(Maintained by Alex Kasman, College of Charleston)