Contributed by
Anu Mahasinghe
Very recently I, published an anthology of Mathemetical Fiction in Sinhalese, named 'Mathe-Matti' (In Sinhalese,'Matti' means stupid girl :)
I thought you might be interested in the contents, and here they are:
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(Mathematti): A motherless teenage schoolgirl in a rural village starts reading popular mathematics books in her attempt to cope with loneliness, eventually starts fooling her peers using mathematical fallacies and paradoxes, to the dismay of her teacher. The story explores the historical contribution of mathematical paradoxes to the development of scientific thought as well, via an absurd dream she sees on Zeno’s encounter with the Socratic school.
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(Oliana’s state): Oliana, a woman of Polynesian origin whom the author knew in Auckland, connects via WhatsApp after 8 years. The author finds that her country has abandoned the decimal system and converted to binary, renaming the island state as the Republic of Binaria. Oliana justifies the move, showing evidence from multiple sources including the writings of Leibniz that binary provides a much better computational base than decimal, also claiming that the ancient Polynesians used binary not only as a number base but as a way of thinking as well. The author is skeptical about the legitimacy of her claims and tries to disprove her.
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(A tale of irrationals): This story revolves around the historical rise and fall of the Pythagorean brotherhood, who once held the political authority of Croton. In particular, it focuses on the Pythagoreans’ aversion to irrational numbers, through a fictitious character of a young female monochord player who joined the brotherhood and secretly admired musical notes expressible only through irrational numbers.
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(The depressed cubic): In a surrealistic setting of a mental hospital, a psychiatrist encounters different patients that resemble historical figures of Tartaglia, Cardano and Omar Khayyam. He too suffers from hallucinations, and falls into an infinite loop in his dreams. In his attempt to overcome this, he learns about the historical development of the solution to the depressed cubic equation, in particular the rivalry between Tartaglia and Cardano. He later finds Omar Khayyam’s geometric solution to the same equation, and compares it with Khayyam’s poetry and finds a way to get over the annoying dream.
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