MATHEMATICAL FICTION:

a list compiled by Alex Kasman (College of Charleston)

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Lambada (1990)
Joel Silbert (Director and Writer) / Sheldon Renan (Screenplay)
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A blend of "Stand and Deliver" with "Dirty Dancing" with a high school math teacher who spends his evenings doing lambada dance moves in night clubs. He appears to be a very dedicated teacher, and in the film the students are won over by his dancing talents, but I'm not sure I would recommend this approach to many math teachers out there. There is lots of discussion of trigonometry in the classroom and a dramatic demonstration of the value of ``rectangular coordinates'' at a pool table.

For some quotes and more specific descriptions of the math that appears, check out QEDCat (by Burkard Polster and Marty Ross).

More information about this work can be found at www.imdb.com.
(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 Lambada
According to my `secret formula', the following works of mathematical fiction are similar to this one:
  1. Stand and Deliver by Ramon Menendez
  2. Super 30 by Vikas Bahl (director) / Sanjeev Dutta (writer)
  3. Cliff Walk by Margaret Dickson
  4. Long Division by Michael Redhill
  5. Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout
  6. The Mirror Has Two Faces by Barbra Streisand (director) / Richard LaGravenese (Writer)
  7. In Our Prime [I-sang-han na-ra-eui su-hak-ja] by Lee Yong-jae (screenwriter) / Dong-hoon Park (director)
  8. Solid Geometry by Ian McEwan
  9. Strange Attractors by Rebecca Goldstein
  10. Two Trains Running by August Wilson
Ratings for Lambada:
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(unrated)

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Categories:
Genre
MotifCool/Heroic Mathematicians, Music, Romance, Math Education,
TopicGeometry/Topology/Trigonometry,
MediumFilms,

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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)