MATHEMATICAL FICTION:

a list compiled by Alex Kasman (College of Charleston)

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A non-Euclidean story or: how to persist when your geometry doesn’t (2022)
Rami Luisto
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This very unusual work of fiction is a proof of a technical mathematical fact in the form of a fantasy novel. The specific claim it proves is that a locally L-bilipschitz mapping between uniformly Ahlfors q-regular, complete and locally compact path-metric spaces X and Y is an L-bilipschitz map when Y is simply connected.

The author worked on this subject as a mathematics PhD student in Finland and decided to present it as a story about map-making dwarves living in a world where a mysterious event has changed the geometry of physical space, rendering 2-dimensional maps useless. The story can read for paragraphs as if it was a traditional fantasy novel, but then inexplicably switches to mathematical notation (including references to human mathematicians like Ahlfors and "bilipschitz").

I am not sufficiently expert in this area to judge whether this result is truly novel nor whether the proof is accurate, but I also have no reason to doubt that it is.

Thanks to Allan Goldberg for pointing it out to me when it was published in the January 2022 issue of The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.

More information about this work can be found at scholarship.claremont.edu.
(Note: This is just one work of mathematical fiction from the list. To see the entire list or to see more works of mathematical fiction, return to the Homepage.)

Works Similar to A non-Euclidean story or: how to persist when your geometry doesn’t
According to my `secret formula', the following works of mathematical fiction are similar to this one:
  1. Saint Joan of New York: A Novel About God and String Theory by Mark Alpert
  2. Squate by Tom Blackford
  3. The Babelogic of Mathematics by Vijay Fafat
  4. An Alchemy of Masques and Mirrors: Book One in the Risen Kingdoms by Curtis Craddock
  5. The Mummy and Miss Nitocris: A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension by George Griffith
  6. When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill
  7. Lost in the Math Museum by Colin Adams
  8. Mandelbrot the Magnificent by Liz Ziemska
  9. Nightscape: The Dreams of Devils by David W. Edwards
  10. The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson
Ratings for A non-Euclidean story or: how to persist when your geometry doesn’t:
RatingsHave you seen/read this work of mathematical fiction? Then click here to enter your own votes on its mathematical content and literary quality or send me comments to post on this Webpage.
Mathematical Content:
5/5 (1 votes)
.
Literary Quality:
2/5 (1 votes)
..

Categories:
GenreFantasy,
MotifProving Theorems,
TopicGeometry/Topology/Trigonometry, Real Mathematics,
MediumNovels, Available Free Online,

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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)