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1 to 999 (1981) |
 | Isaac Asimov |
|
When cryptologists try to break a simple code, one of the key clues is
the frequency with which letters appear. In English, the letter "a"
is one of the most frequently used letters. It is therefore... (more) |
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21 (2008) |
 | Robert Luketic (Director) |
|
As I understand it, the book by Ben Mezrich which inspired this film is non-fiction. It told the true story (though using pseudonyms) of a team comprised of an MIT math professor and six MIT students... (more) |
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The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri (2008) |
|
| David Bajo |
|
Philip is a mathematician who works in the financial industry, a quant. We also meet his ex-wife, Rebecca, who is a math professor. But, the main character in this novel is a woman who we only meet in... (more) |
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36 Arguments for the Existence of God (2010) |
|
| Rebecca Goldstein |
|
This new novel by Rebecca Goldstein, whose Strange Attractors is one of my favorite works of mathematical fiction, features as two main characters a woman known as "the goddess of game theory" and a Hasidic... (more) |
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The 39 Steps (1935) |
|
| Alfred Hitchcock (director) |
|
Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 thriller follows the getaway of Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), a man accused of murder. While Hannay must outsmart the police in his escape, he also finds himself sought... (more) |
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4.50 from Paddington (1957) |
|
| Agatha Christie |
|
A suggestion for your site: In the Agatha Christie novel 4.50 from Paddington an important role is played by Lucy Eyelesbarrow, a woman in her thirties who has a First in Maths from Oxford. She declined... (more) |
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7 Steps to Midnight (1993) |
|
| Richard Matheson |
|
In this unnerving, `Kafka-esque' suspense novel by well known horror author Richard Matheson, a government mathematician sees reality collapse around him as his life is turned into a surrealistic version... (more) |
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The A, B, C of the Higher Mathematics (1907) |
|
| Ramaswami Aiyar |
|
A 1-page lyrical parable about the evolution of calculus through the marriage of Algebra with the concept of Limits (so the tale says), and the birth of its 3 Princes - Astronomy (using Infinity),... (more) |
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A. Botts and the Moebius Strip (1945) |
|
| William Hazlett Upson |
|
William Hazlett Upson wrote a series of pieces for the Saturday Evening Post about a salesman for The Earthworm Tractor Company, written as a dialog of letters and memos between Alexander Botts and his... (more) |
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Abendland (Occident) (2007) |
|
| Michael Köhlmeier |
|
The protagonist is an Austrian
mathematician who, according to the fictional invention of the author,
worked with Emmy Noether in Göttingen during the 'Golden Age' of
German Mathematics, i.e. before Hitler came to power. In chapter 6 we
learn a lot about Noether's life in Göttingen, Moscow, and the US.
(more) |
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The Absolute Value of Mike (2011) |
|
| Kathryn Erskine |
|
Mike is a fourteen-year-old with dyscalculia, but his father is a professional mathematician and is quite insistent that he should learn math and go to Newton High, the math magnet school. According to... (more) |
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An Abundance of Katherines (2006) |
|
| John Green |
|
Colin Singleton is a semi-burnt-out child prodigy who spends a summer coming of age as he develops a theorem to account for the fact that he's been dumped by nineteen girls, all named Katherine. Includes... (more) |
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According to the Law (1996) |
|
| Solvej Balle |
|
Four interconnected stories are told which wrap around onto themselves like a M¨bius strip. But, it is not only the structure of the story that is mathematical. In the first we meet a biochemist... (more) |
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Account Unsettled [Crime Impuni] (1954) |
|
| Georges Simenon |
|
Elie is a Polish Jew who has come to study math in pre-war France. He is noticeably anti-social and awkward. He seems to be aware of the landlady's daughter, but neither to be in love with her nor sexually... (more) |
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Actuarial / The Paradox Paradox (2010) |
|
| Buzz Mauro |
|
These two extremely short stories by Mauro, part of his thesis project which consisted entirely of original works of mathematical fiction, appeared in the December 2010 issue of Prime Number Magazine.
Actuarial... (more) |
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Ada and the Engine (2015) |
|
| Lauren Gunderson |
|
For Lauren Gunderson, whose plays all seem to be about emotionally potent mathematical subjects, a study of Ada Lovelace seems like a natural choice. Born Ada Byron (the daughter of the scandalous poet... (more) |
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The Adding Machine (1923) |
|
| Elmer Rice |
|
This highly symbolic play tells the life, death, afterlife, and
rebirth of Zero, a mild-mannered nobody who is hoping to get a raise
for twenty five years of loyal service as a clerk doing addition... (more) |
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Advanced Calculus of Murder (1988) |
|
| Erik Rosenthal |
|
In the second book in the Dan Brodsky series (following Calculus of Murder by the same author), Brodsky is invited to COTCA (the Conference on Operator Theory and C*-Algebras at Oxford University). While... (more) |
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Adventure of the Final Problem (1893) |
|
| Sir Arthur Conan Doyle |
|
This first Sherlock Holmes story about Professor Moriarty (later to be
viewed as Holmes' arch enemy) introduces him as a professor of
mathematics who won fame as a young man for his extension of the
binomial... (more) |
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The Adventures of a Mathematician (2020) |
|
| Thor Klein |
|
This film about mathematician Stanislaw Ulam is based on his autobiography with the same title but focuses only on the period of time when, as a recent immigrant from Poland, he was working on the Manhattan... (more) |
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The Adventures of a University Math Professor (2001) |
|
| Donald A. Buckeye |
|
This slim book is a very easy, unassuming, pleasant read which adults and sixth graders can both read with joy. It is an autobiographical fictionalization of some parts of a mathematics teacher's life.... (more) |
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The Adventures of the Parrot (2008) |
|
| Gary Brown |
|
Gary I. Brown, chair of the math department at CSBSJU in St. Joseph MN, has written two detective stories in which "The Parrot" uses mathematics (specifically, non-zero sum games and fair division problems) to solve the mysteries. The stories appear together in a new book from North Star Press which is available from Amazon.com .
(more) |
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After Math (2013) |
|
| Denise Grover Swank |
|
This is a young adult novel about a college math major, a typical nerd with some apparent neuroses, who learns to be much more "normal" when she is forced to tutor a popular male soccer player.
Thanks to my student, Madeline Goodman, for bringing this book to my attention. (more) |
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Against the Day (2006) |
|
| Thomas Pynchon |
|
This novel, set in the time frame 1890s to 1920s interleaves several
plots and styles, from boys' adventures to peacetime spies to gunslingers'
revenges. The forces of progress stomp over all the... (more) |
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Against the Odds (2001) |
|
| Martin Gardner |
|
Luther Washington, a young, African-American boy in Butterfield, KS must overcome several kinds of prejudice to become a mathematician.
First, he must face the prejudices of his father that his interest... (more) |
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Agha and Math (1946) |
|
| Vladmir Karapetoff |
|
A very funny, very creative tale of how logarithms might have been invented in ancient times, without it having had to wait for Napier.
In ancient times, ‘Agha, the Master’ was a rich landed proprietor... (more) |
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Agora (2009) |
|
| Alejandro Amenábar (writer and director) / Mateo Gil (writer) |
|
A film based on the life of Hypatia of Alexandria. What little we know of the real Hypatia suggests that she was a talented mathematician and teacher (neither of them easy professions for a woman to enter... (more) |
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Ahmes, the Moonchild (2010) |
|
| Tefcros Michaelides |
|
The Rhind Papyrus is an Egyptian document from around 1550 BC featuring worked math problems. Its author (usually transliterated into Roman characters as Ahmes or Ahmose) is arguably the most ancient... (more) |
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Albert's Bridge (1967) |
|
| Tom Stoppard |
|
A radio play about a philosophy graduate student who gets a job painting the Clufton Bay Bridge. It takes him and three other workers exactly two years to paint the entire bridge, at which time they must... (more) |
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Alexander's Infinity (2021) |
|
| Lidija Stankovikj |
|
This novel describes the spiritual journey of "a middle-aged Scandinavian mathematician with a bent for the metaphysical" to India and Burma. I have not yet had a chance to read it, but the author has lived in India, Burma, and Sweden and holds a degree in mathematics, so she should at least know something about those aspects of the plot.
(more) |
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The Alice Network (2017) |
|
| Kate Quinn |
|
Set in the aftermath of World War II, The Alice Network follows a Bennington College sophomore Charlotte “Charlie” St. Clair on an impromptu search for her cherished cousin Rose. While fleeing... (more) |
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All Cry Chaos (2011) |
|
| Leonard Rosen |
|
When a mathematician is killed in an explosion immediately before presenting his paper on the inevitability of a one-world economy to the World Trade Organization, the case falls to Interpol agent Henri... (more) |
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All Scot and Bothered (2020) |
|
| Kerrigan Byrne |
|
This is another romance novel set in the 19th century featuring a female mathematician. It features such lines as:
She had very few innate talents, but the rhythm and structure of sexual relations... (more) |
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All the Light We Cannot See (2014) |
|
| Anthony Doerr |
|
Doerr's Pulitzer Prize winning novel follows two children in World War II, a blind French girl hiding with her father and a valuable jewel from the museum where he works and an orphaned German boy. When... (more) |
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The Almond Tree (2012) |
|
| Michelle Cohen Corasanti |
|
A poor Palestinian boy growing up in Israel during the 1950s and 1960s endures persecution but eventually becomes a successful scientific researcher because of his mathematical skills.
The author, who... (more) |
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Alone with You in the Ether: A Love Story (2022) |
|
| Olivia Blake |
|
A bipolar artist and an obsessive mathematician who meet by chance get to know each other (and themselves) better through the course of six conversations. Although the artist already has a boyfriend,... (more) |
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Along Came Polly (2004) |
|
| John Hamburg (Writer and Director) |
|
[This film] stars Ben Stiller as risk-assessing Actuary Reuben Feffer and Jennifer Aniston as love interest Polly Prince. Because Feffer must know the risks inherent in many situations, he becomes inhibited... (more) |
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Alphabet (2002) |
|
| Chelsea Spear |
|
A silent, short film which shows intertwined clips of a young girl playing the french horn and answering a question at the board in her algebra class. Reviews of the film that I've read suggest that she... (more) |
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The Amber Shadows (2016) |
|
| Lucy Ribchester |
|
This is another thriller set at Bletchley Park during World War II. Many of the characters are described as mathematicians and Alan Turing is mentioned occasionally, but math is definitely not the center... (more) |
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Amy and Isabelle (1998) |
|
| Elizabeth Strout |
|
A highly praised mother-daughter novel, selected by Oprah, and
recently produced by Oprah as a made-for-TV movie.
Set in 1971 Maine, a 16-year-old girl has an affair with her
high school math... (more) |
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And Be a Villain (1948) |
|
| Rex Stout |
|
Rex
Stout and his seventy some Nero Wolfe novels are generally regarded as
amongst the greatest mystery novels ever written. They read as fresh today
as when the series started in 1934, and they... (more) |
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Annika Riz, Math Whiz (Franklin School Friends) (2014) |
|
| Claudia Mills |
|
Recently I have been looking for math books for my young children when I came across Annika Riz, Math Whiz by Claudia Mills. I checked the archives of your site and it appears that this book is not on... (more) |
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Antonia's Line (1995) |
|
| Marleen Gorris |
|
About three or more generations of
strong and self-sufficient women who live on a farm and the people
around them. Antonia's granddaughter is a genius, namely a
mathematician and a musician. But she... (more) |
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Apartheid, Superstrings and Mordecai Thubana (1991) |
|
| Michael Bishop |
|
I don't want to get into a debate here about whether superstrings are math or physics. I know mathematicians and physicists who would argue (with some good points on each side) that it is in their area... (more) |
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Apeirogon: A Novel (2020) |
|
| Colum McCann |
|
This novel with a mathematical title is based on the real lives of two peace activists, Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian and Rami Elhanan, an Israeli, both fathers of young daughters who died violently in... (more) |
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Applied Mathematics (1898) |
|
| Percival Henry Truman |
|
A charming little tale about some mathematical fracas in the Kingdom of Nunvalia, and its resolution which left everyone, including a befuddled king, happy.
Ferdinand, the star pupil of the court... (more) |
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Arcadia (1993) |
|
| Tom Stoppard |
|
Stoppard's critically successful play includes long discussions of topics of
mathematical interest including: Fermat's Last Theorem and Newtonian
determinism, iterated algorithms, the second law of thermodynamics,
Fourier's... (more) |
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Archimedes, a planetarium opera (2007) |
|
| James Dashow |
|
Opera, as in people singing and music playing, and not the
usual Latin for "works".
James Dashow has been scripting, composing, and recording
Archimedes, a "planetarium opera" for the past ten years.
It's... (more) |
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The Argentine Ant (2017) |
|
| T.C. Boyle |
|
A mathematician, his wife, and their baby who suffers from a skin sensitivity condition uproot their lives and move to a new city:
This was an adventure, pure and simple. Or more than an adventure;... (more) |
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Arithmetic Town / Arithmetic (1996) |
|
| Todd McEwen |
|
This novel puts you into the stream of consciousness of Joe Lake, a boy growing up in California in the 1950s. For him, arithmetic represents all that is wrong with his world. It is difficult, ugly,... (more) |
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The Arnold Proof (2002) |
|
| Jessica Francis Kane |
|
This short story begins with a quote from Philip E.B. Jourdain's essay "The Nature of Mathematics". In the quote, he explains how in the process of carrying out a complicated computation, one may want... (more) |
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The Art Student's War (2009) |
|
| Brad Leithauser |
|
In this novel, Bea Paradiso is an art student during World War II who makes portraits of wounded soldiers. (Not coincidentally, the author's mother-in-law did the same, and the book is enhanced by the... (more) |
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Astor Place Barber (2023) |
|
| Audrey Nasar |
|
A short piece that employs a humorous McGuffin to introduce the Barber's Paradox.
Both frequent site contributor Dr. Allan Goldberg and the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics think this is an example... (more) |
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The Auden Test (2016) |
|
| Lawrence Aronovitch
|
|
A short play in which poet W.H. Auden delivers a speech in 1954 on the same day that he learns of the death of his friend, mathematician Alan Turing. Although they were contemporaries, I'm not aware of... (more) |
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The Axiom of Choice (2009) |
|
| David Corbett |
|
An extremely well-crafted short story in which math professor coldly recounts for a detective how the bloody bodies of his wife and his student came to be in his house. It is not really a murder mystery,... (more) |
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Babbage (2008) |
|
| Claire Barker (writer-director) / Eamon Wyse (writer) |
|
A 2010 movie sponsored by the British Council and directed by Claire Barker. It is a short, 15-minute vignette, a dramatization of a fictional dinner conversation between Charles Babbage, his religious... (more) |
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Bad Boy Brawley Brown (2002) |
|
| Walter Mosley |
|
This is the sixth book in the highly praised Easy Rawlins mysteries
that began with DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS. They are set in post-WWII
black Los Angeles, and unfold over the years. (The... (more) |
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Balthazar and I (2021) |
|
| Massar (Writer and Director) |
|
I recently created a short post for this movie based only on this description that I found on IMDB:
The main character is a lonely modern man addicted to sex. He can not understand women and is obsessed... (more) |
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The Banana Girls (2017) |
|
| Karim F. Hirji |
|
This rare example of African mathematical fiction was written by a Fellow of the Tanzania Academy of Sciences who previously won awards for his work on the statistical analysis of small sample discrete... (more) |
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The Bangalore Detectives Club (2022) |
|
| Harini Narendra |
|
On the first page of this mystery set in 1920's India, a scrap of paper identifies the person a desperate character seeks:
MRS KAVERI MURTHY, Mathematician and Lady Detective.
The rest of the novel... (more) |
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The Bank (2001) |
|
| Robert Connolly |
|
A brilliant young mathematician (aren't they all!) uses chaos theory to develop a mathematical model that predicts the stock market in this Australian thriller (co-produced by Axiom Films) .
I love... (more) |
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The Barking Clock (1947) |
|
| Harry Stephen Keeler / Hazel Goodwin Keeler |
|
Tuddleton T. Trotter, author of a book which claims that all criminal mysteries can be solved mathematically, has only hours to save Joe Czeszczicki, a death row inmate soon to be electrocuted for the... (more) |
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Batorsag and Szerelem [a.k.a. Beautiful Ohio] (2006) |
|
| Ethan Canin |
|
A very sensitively written story about a child, William, who grows up in the shadow of his brother, Clive, who is a math prodigy. Clive, in addition to his strong mathematical skills, is also a very... (more) |
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Battle of the Frog and the Mouse (1984) |
|
| John Hays |
|
This succinct, well-writtten fable captures the polemics between Hilbert and Brouwer related to Hilbert's Formalist position and Brouwer's Constructivist position vis a vis the foundations of mathematics... (more) |
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A Beautiful Mind (2001) |
|
| Sylvia Nasar / Akiva Goldsman |
|
Although the book A Beautiful Mind: A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr. is not fictional, Ron Howard's film (released December 2001) most certainly is. (I say this not as a complaint, but just to justify... (more) |
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The Bed and the Bachelor (2011) |
|
| Tracy Anne Warren |
|
Although it involves cryptography and the Napoleonic wars, this novel is really more of a romance than it is historical fiction or espionage.
Sebastianne Dumont is the daughter of a French mathematician... (more) |
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Bees (1848) |
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| Anonymous |
|
A simple one-page story written to convey the standard “Argument from Design” championed by William Paley, by articulating how the intricate hives constructed by bees follow mathematical principles,... (more) |
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Belonging to Karovsky (2002) |
|
| Kathryn Schwille |
|
This short story, published in the literary magazine Crazyhorse concerns the boring and lonely Mr. Digby who was the downstairs neighbor of Karovsky, the brilliant (but of course, seriously insane) mathematician... (more) |
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Benchmark (2014) |
|
| Catherine Aird |
|
This short story does little more than set up the scenario of the famous Prisoner's Dilemma from game theory. The detectives do discuss the connection between their situation and that theoretical example... (more) |
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Beyond the Limit: The Dream of Sofya Kovalevskaya (2002) |
|
| Joan Spicci |
|
This book is a novelized account of the life of
Sofia Kovalevskaya (aka Sonia Kovalevskey and infinitely1 many alternative
spellings), famous today as the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in
mathematics.... (more) |
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Bianca (1984) |
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| Nanni Moretti (director and screenplay) |
|
A math teacher (played by Nanni Moretti himself) has odd obsessions and compulsions in this film, including his crush on colleague Bianca. Although his anti-social behavior seems to be destroying his... (more) |
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The Big Short (2015) |
|
| Charles Randolph (writer) / Adam McKay (writer and director) |
|
Although I did very much enjoy this creative fictional adaptation of Michael Lewis' non-fictional account of mortgage induced US housing price collapse, I did not initially include it in this database.... (more) |
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The Bird with the Broken Wing (1930) |
|
| Agatha Christie |
|
The Harley Quin stories (this collection, plus two later stories) are amongst the most peculiar mysteries ever written. (They certainly are Dame Agatha's most peculiar. They were also her personal... (more) |
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The Birds (BC414) |
|
| Aristophanes |
|
In one scene of this classic Greek play, the geometer Meton appears
and...well, it's pretty short. So why should I summarize it when I can
simply reproduce it here!
(Enter
METON, With surveying... (more) |
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The Bishop Murder Case (1928) |
|
| S.S. van Dine (pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright) |
|
Our hero, Vance, says at the end of this mystery novel: "At the outset I was able to postulate a mathematician as the criminal agent. The difficulty of naming the murderer lay in the fact that nearly... (more) |
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The Blue Door (2006) |
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| Tanya Barfield |
|
A successful African-American mathematics professor who has tried to ignore racism and its implications for his life is visited by the memories of three dead relatives during a sleepless night in this... (more) |
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The Body Counter (2018) |
|
| Anne Frasier |
|
Detective Jude Fontaine must stop a pathological killer whose murder sprees are dictated by the Fibonacci sequence.
Fontaine is known for her ability to read people. (She often can tell when people... (more) |
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The Body Outside the Kremlin (2020) |
|
| James L. May |
|
This novel is a combination of historical fiction and a murder mystery, with literary ambitions. The narrator is a former math student who is sent to an island prison in the early days of the USSR. There... (more) |
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Bone Chase (2020) |
|
| Weston Ochse |
|
Ethan McCloud discovers a massive conspiracy to hide a historical truth in an thriller that combines science and the Bible.
In this unsubtle attempt to create a new entry in the genre which achieved... (more) |
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Bonita Avenue (2010) |
|
| Peter Buwalda |
|
This widely acclaimed and popular Dutch novel concerns a mathematician who is a sort of intellectual public figure that the United States does not seem to have. After winning the Fields Medal for his... (more) |
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The Book of Getting Even (2009) |
|
| Benjamin Taylor |
|
A brilliant homosexual teenager uses mathematics as an escape from the pressures of everyday life, including his father, a rabbi in 1970's New Orleans. Along the way, he gets to know (and love, in a variety of ways) the family of a Nobel prize winning physicist and he himself becomes a cosmologist.
(more) |
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Book of Knut: a novel by Knut Knudson (2012) |
|
| Halvor Aakhus |
|
Halvor Aakhus, who has an undergraduate degree in math and an MFA in writing, wrote this unusual work of fiction that takes the form of a novel by an apparently dead author named Knut Knudson which has... (more) |
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The Boy Who Escaped Paradise (2016) |
|
| J.M. Lee (author) / Chi-Young Kim (translator) |
|
After a body is found surrounded by mathematical formulas in Queens, a young Korean man named Gil-Mo is arrested for the murder. Because of his autistic tendencies, he does not respond at all to the usual... (more) |
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Brazzaville Beach (1990) |
|
| William Boyd |
|
Main character is a women studying chimpanzees in Africa, but her
ex-husband is a set theorist who goes mad because he fails to prove a
theorem.
One of my favourite authors, and one of his best... (more) |
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Bread & Kisses (2010) |
|
| Katherine Fitzgerald (writer and director) |
|
In this wonderful short film, a mathematician desperately trying to correct a hole in a proof falls in love with a baker. He uncharacteristically begins taking baking lessons from her but returns to... (more) |
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Break Your Heart (2015) |
|
| Rhonda Helms |
|
The cultural diversity in this romance novel about the affair between an African-American math major and her Japanese cryptography professor is a pleasant surprise, but that is just about the only positive thing I can think to say. It does not seem to have anything interesting to say about either mathematics or academia. They are just the backdrop for a forbidden erotic encounter. (more) |
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Breaking the Code (1986) |
|
| Hugh Whitemore (playwright) |
|
This biography of Alan Turing is a "character study" of this
fascinating mathematician. Although we do see some mathematics (including
an especially nice description of Gödel's Theorem and its mathematical
significance)... (more) |
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The Brink of Infinity (1936) |
|
| Stanley G. Weinbaum |
|
A
mathematics professor is kidnapped by a madman with a grudge against
mathematicians, who threatens dire consequences unless the prof can
solve a math riddle he has concocted: by asking ten questions,... (more) |
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The Brothers Karamazov (1880) |
|
| Fyodor Dostoevsky |
|
In this classic final masterwork by Dostoevsky, the existence of non-Euclidean geometry is mentioned at one point. Although the theme is not explicitly carried throughout the rest of the novel, it plays... (more) |
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Buried Alive at the End of the World (2011) |
|
| Blair Bourrassa |
|
A completely paralyzed mathematician receives congratulations from colleagues and other hospital visitors on the culmination of his research in a large scale physics experiment that is about to be conducted..but... (more) |
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Burn Notice (Episode: Signals and Codes) (2009) |
|
| Jason Tracey (screenplay) / Jeremiah Chechik (director) |
|
Presumably, each episode of this old TV series features ex-CIA agent Michael Westen catching some "bad guys" in the hope of being re-accepted by his former employer. (I say "presumably" because I've... (more) |
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The Butterfly Effect (2001) |
|
| D.F. Roberts |
|
Only available for Kindle download as far as I can tell, this sexually explicit novel follows Dr. Martin Crowe as he ``uses chaos math'' (sounds unlikely!) to solve unusual problems for people, such as his ex-lover who is now being blackmailed by her ex-husband.
--Suggested for inclusion by Vijay Fafat. (more) |
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A Calculated Demise (2007) |
|
| Robert Spiller |
|
A high school math teacher, Bonnie Pinkwater, solves the mystery surrounding the murder of a PE teacher, a student, and the family of the boy suspected in the killing.
This sequel to The Witch of Agnesi... (more) |
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A Calculated Man (2022) |
|
| Paul Tobin (writer) / Alberto Alburquerque (artist) |
|
An accountant for the mob, now in witness protection, must defend himself from his former employers, but with the power of math on his side he is quite capable of killing those who have been sent to eliminate... (more) |
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Cálculo Infinitesimal de una variable
(1994) |
|
| Juan de Burgos Román |
|
Apparently, this Spanish calculus textbook begins each chapter with a "tale". I have not yet had a chance to see the book myself, and so I cannot say for certain whether these really are "fiction" or... (more) |
|
|
Cálculo Infinitesimal de varias variables
(1995) |
|
| Juan de Burgos Román |
|
Apparently, this Spanish calculus textbook begins each chapter with a "tale". I have not yet had a chance to see the book myself, and so I cannot say for certain whether these really are "fiction" or... (more) |
|
|
Calculus (Newton's Whores) (2004) |
|
| Carl Djerassi |
|
The credit for the invention of calculus has long been contested, being claimed by both Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. A committee established by the Royal Society in 1712 concluded that Newton was... (more) |
|
|
Calculus and Pizza (2003) |
|
| Clifford Pickover |
|
A pizza chef teaches calculus to his restaurant patrons. Romance and hilarity ensue.
(more) |
|
|
The Calculus of Love (2011) |
|
| Dan Clifton (Writer and Director) |
|
A professor who is obsessed with proving Goldbach's Conjecture challenges a class of graduate students to make any progress on it. But, is he truly motivated by a love of pure mathematics and its search... (more) |
|
|
Calculus of Murder (1986) |
|
| Erik Rosenthal |
|
"The hero is a part-time instructor and
researcher at Berkeley and moonlights as a PI. He solves his cases
using calculus. The narrative is excellent, humorous, and believable."
Actually, I just... (more) |
|
|
The Cambist and Lord Iron (2007) |
|
| Daniel Abraham |
|
The story is set in a no-name kingdom, seemingly medieval but with
certain modernisms. The cambist of the title is a minor worker, whose
daily routine is interrupted by Lord Iron, who has come to... (more) |
|
|
The Cambridge Quintet (1999) |
|
| John L. Casti |
|
A group of famous historical figures, including Wittegenstein,
Schrödinger, J.B.S. Haldane, and Alan Turing meet at the home of
C.P. Snow to discuss the question of whether machines can think.
John... (more) |
|
|
The Cambridge Theorem (1990) |
|
| Tony Cape |
|
It is a British-Russian spy novel in the style of Le Carre that is set in Cambridge, UK. If you like that sort of thing, fine. It is true that the murdered genius is a math graduate student, and he leaves... (more) |
|
|
The Capacity for Infinite Happiness (2015) |
|
| Alexis von Konigslow |
|
A math grad student trying to start her thesis on graph theory discovers some of her family's secrets when visiting their resort in Canada.
Graph theory involves the study of vertices (points or dots)... (more) |
|
|
The Capsule (2010) |
|
| Miceal Og O'Donnell (writer and director) |
|
A former mathematician who has tape on his glasses, a sleeping bag on his back and talks just like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Main is ordered by his doctor to be more social (to get out of his "capsule").... (more) |
|
|
Cardano and the Case of the Cubic (2005) |
|
| Jeff Adams |
|
This parody of early 20th century "Hard Boiled Private Detective" novels is instead a short story about 16th century mathematician Gerolamo Cardano.
Its opening paragraphs clearly set the tone:
It... (more) |
|
|
Carry On, Mr. Bowditch (1955) |
|
| Jean Lee Latham |
|
The life of early American mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch, famous for his work on techniques of navigation, is fictionalized in this novel for young adults. Although the mathematical details are not... (more) |
|
|
Le Cas de Sophie K. (2005) |
|
| Jean-Frangois Peyret (playwright and director) |
|
This play about Sofya Kovalevskaya emphasizes her nihilistic leanings (as expressed in Kovalevskaya's own fiction). The production featured unusual modern staging, such as having three actresses portraying... (more) |
|
|
Case of Lies (2005) |
|
| Perri O'Shaughnessy |
|
An old, unsolved casino murder becomes mathematical when three of the witnesses turn out to have been math students using their skills to win at gambling. Quite a bit of detailed discussion of number... (more) |
|
|
The Case of the Flying Hands (2001) |
|
| Harry Stephen Keeler / Hazel Goodwin Keeler |
|
Quiribus Brown, a 7 1/2 foot tall man raised on a farm by a retired mathematician who taught him nothing but math, must solve four crimes using mathematics or be imprisoned on charges of perjury by his... (more) |
|
|
The Case of the Murdered Mathematician (2001) |
|
| Julia Barnes / Kathy Ivey |
|
This story is actually a fictionalized account of the "Murder Mystery" game
played by the MAA Student Mathematics Club at Western Carolina University.
Clues provide insight into possible motivations... (more) |
|
|
Casebook (2014) |
|
| Mona Simpson |
|
A novel written from the point of view of Miles Adler-Hart, a boy who is spying on his mother. He learns of his parents' divorce, his mother's sex life, and her lover's dark secret. Like the superheroes... (more) |
|
|
The Cat in Numberland (2006) |
|
| Ivar Ekeland (author) / John O'Brien (illustrator) |
|
This picture book uses the idea of a hotel with infintely many rooms for introducing some advanced concepts about numbers and infinity to children. The hotel, run in the book by "Mr. and Mrs. Hilbert",... (more) |
|
|
The Catalyst [The Strange Attractor] (1991) |
|
| Desmond Cory |
|
Mathematics professor John Dobie gets caught up in a truly mind-boggling
mystery when one of his former students, his wife's best friend, and then
his own wife wind up dead, and the police consider him to be a prime
suspect.
This is the first, my personal favorite, of the three "Professor Dobie
Mysteries" written by British author Desmond Cory. (See also "The Mask of Zeus" and " (more) |
|
|
Catching Genius (2007) |
|
| Kristy Kiernan |
|
A novel about a pair of sisters, one of whom is a "math genius". The title refers to the fact that she thinks "eyecue" is a disease when she first hears as a child that she has a high one and warns her... (more) |
|
|
The Center of the Universe (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
This short story was intended to serve two different purposes. On the one hand it is a glimpse into the lives and interactions of mathematics graduate students. And, on the other, it addresses the philosophical... (more) |
|
|
The Central Tendency (2003) |
|
| Daniel Kaysen |
|
In the first portion of this short story, a teenager and the aunt who took her in when her parents died enjoy doing math together. However, when the girl begins to get advanced training from Cambridge... (more) |
|
|
A Certain Ambiguity: A Mathematical Novel (2007) |
|
| Gaurav Suri / Hartosh Singh Bal |
|
The intertwined stories of Ravi, a Stanford student taking a course on "Infinity" in the 1980's, and his grandfather who was jailed for blasphemy in New Jersey in 1919 constitute a philosophical investigation... (more) |
|
|
The Chair of Philanthromathematics (1908) |
|
| O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) |
|
Jeff Peters and Andy Tucker, con men in
the O. Henry stories collected in this volume, are a bit
uncomfortable after scoring a really big scam. So they
... (more) |
|
|
Chasing Vermeer (2004) |
|
| Blue Balliet |
|
A mystery novel for 6th graders. The first of a set of 3 separate “mystery” books in the “Hardy Boys / Nancy Drew“ genre. Two children, Calder and Petra, are neighbors and classmates... (more) |
|
|
Child's Play (1986) |
|
| Isaac Asimov |
|
Young Griswold uses something he just learned
in elementary school math class to solve a minor stumper. (Be
warned: the problem has a minor bug. Change "mix" to "nix".)
Published in the... (more) |
|
|
The Chimera Prophesies (2007) |
|
| Elliott Ostler |
|
A mathematician known only as ``#6'', while trying to come up with a model that would predict probabilities for different human behaviors, finds that in fact he can very nearly predict the future with... (more) |
|
|
The Chosen (1967) |
|
| Chaim Potok |
|
In Chaim Potok's classic novel about two Jewish teenagers growing up in New York City at the end of World War II, one of the two boys expresses an interest in symbolic logic:
'What kind of mathematics... (more) |
|
|
Christmas at Cardwell Ranch (2013) |
|
| B.J. Daniels |
|
In keeping with my expectations of a Harlequin Romance novel, Christmas at Cardwell Ranch does have an improbable love affair, between a modern-day cowboy and a female mathematician. However, this one... (more) |
|
|
Chronicles of a Comer (1972) |
|
| K.M O'Donnell (aka Barry N. Malzberg) |
|
A short story about a statistician who believes in the
second coming of Christ and looks for it in the statistical
correlations between the events and people's reactions to
those events (e.g. "14%... (more) |
|
|
The Cipher (2015) |
|
| John C. Ford |
|
As he turns 18, the son of the billionaire who owns the patent on public-key encryption finds himself in several complicated situations. There is a love triangle involving both his long-time girlfriend... (more) |
|
|
The City of Devi (2013) |
|
| Manil Suri |
|
Manil Suri, the author of this erotic, dystopian, Indian adventure, is a professional mathematician. And so, it is not surprising that there is some mathematics in it. However, there really is not much... (more) |
|
|
City of Infinite Bridges (2007) |
|
| Alex Rose |
|
A very short, definitely fictional but delightful little tale about Katharina Gsell, Euler's wife. In this fictional account, Katharina is supposed to have displayed a graph of the 7 Konigsberg bridges... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Cliff Walk (1987) |
|
| Margaret Dickson |
|
This novel which alternates between being a melancholy character study and thriller, tells the story of a woman named Crelly, from her childhood in a family torn apart by abuse and tragedy, to the separation... (more) |
|
|
The Clueless Girl's Guide to Being a Genius (2011) |
|
| Janice Repka |
|
An excellent book for 4th — 5th graders but one I would recommend for all teachers and students. Written as an interlaced, first-person account of two young girls — Aphrodite, who is a math... (more) |
|
|
Cobra (2022) |
|
| R. Ajay Gnanamuthu (Director) / Kannan (Screenplay) / Sekar Neelan (Screenplay) |
|
This picaresque Indian film focuses on a powerful crime lord named Cobra who also happens to be a mathematical genius known as "Mathi". It is ambitious in its three-hour length and its attempt to combine... (more) |
|
|
Coconuts (1926) |
|
| Ben Ames Williams |
|
The story is a very nicely written tale of one man, Wadlin, whose only passion in life is mathematics - numbers, puzzles, Diophantine equations ("indeterminates"), statistics. As the author describes... (more) |
|
|
The Code for Love and Heartbreak (2020) |
|
| Jillian Cantor |
|
In this young adult adaptation of Jane Austen's "Emma", a high school student unsuccessfully attempts to use her knowledge of mathematics to create a matchmaking app for her classmates. It is yet another... (more) |
|
|
Code to Zero (2000) |
|
| Ken Follett |
|
This thriller is set in 1958, with backdrop the first successful launching
of a US satellite. Several of the characters are mathematicians turned
rocket scientists. They frequently muse rather explicitly... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Coffee, Love and Matrix Algebra (2014) |
|
| Gary Ernest Davis |
|
This novel follows a year in the life of Jeffrey Albacete, a mathematics professor at a Rhode Island University, who is best known as the author of a textbook on matrix algebra.
Although I think it... (more) |
|
|
Coincidence (2013) |
|
| J.W. Ironmonger |
|
This book begins with the discovery of a three-year old girl named Azalea, alone at a seaside fairground and goes on to show us that her life is filled with surprising coincidences. When she grows up... (more) |
|
|
Colonel Lágrimas (2016) |
|
| Carlos Fonseca Suárez |
|
This novel is loosely based on the life of Alexander Grothendieck and is "creatively" constructed, like the writings of the Oulipo group or Borges. The Costa Rican/Puerto Rican author focuses much of his attention on Latin America and war, but mathematics itself and eccentricities (Grothendieck was eccentric!) also are major themes. The English version was translated by Megan McDowell.
(more) |
|
|
Com os Meus Olhos de Cão [With My Dog Eyes] (1986) |
|
| Hilda Hilst |
|
An aphasic Brazillian mathematics professor narrates his own decline into insanity.
Hilda Hilst was a Brazillian author whose works often addressed the topic of insanity (perhaps because both of her parents... (more) |
|
|
The Company of Strangers (2001) |
|
| Robert Wilson |
|
A bittersweet romance/thriller about a young woman mathematician in
Portugal spying for the British during World War II. There is a lot of
interesting stuff in this novel if you're looking at the romance... (more) |
|
|
Completeness (2011) |
|
| Itamar Moses |
|
This play, currently in production at New York's Playwrights Horizons Mainstage Theater, tells the story of a romance between a biology graduate student and a computer science graduate student. Having... (more) |
|
|
Comrades in Miami (2005) |
|
| Jose Latour |
|
Colonel Victoria Valiente is an important figure in the Communist party of Cuba. However, her husband is a famous mathematician, Manuel Pardo. Manuel's job allows him to travel widely and he becomes... (more) |
|
|
Confusions of Young Torless (1906) |
|
| Robert Musil |
|
A semi-autobiographical novel set in a military
academy in a desolate corner of the Austro-Hungarian empire, is the
story of the intellectual awakening of an intelligent adolescent, and
contains several... (more) |
|
|
La Conjecture de Syracuse (2008) |
|
| Antoine Billot |
|
Although in reality the Collatz Conjecture remains unresolved, in Billot's novel the problem was famously solved by Etienne Thèseus, who figured out the solution while he fought for France in Algeria... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Constans (The Constant Factor) (1980) |
|
| Krzysztof Zanussi |
|
In this film Witold, a Polish man who believes that he can explain all of life's mysteries and solve all of life's problems with mathematics, learns otherwise. (more) |
|
|
Conte d'ete (1996) |
|
| Eric Rohmer |
|
With a title that can be translated as "A Summer's Tale", this is the third film in Rohmer's "seasons" series, preceeded by tales of
spring and winter and followed by a tale of autumn in 1998. In this... (more) |
|
|
Continuity (1999) |
|
| Buzz Mauro |
|
This short story cleverly uses the epsilon-delta definition of continuity of a function to discuss the changing self-esteem of a character over time. After briefly recalling the rigorous definition, it... (more) |
|
|
Continuums (2008) |
|
| Robert Carr |
|
The decisions we make and the difficulty in accepting the consequences is the main focus of this book about a Romanian mathematician who leaves her country and her daughter to be in a place that she could... (more) |
|
|
The Countable (2011) |
|
| Ken Liu |
|
An autistic boy finds comfort in Cantor's discovery that the set of fractions is greatly outnumbered by the set of irrationals. (See, for example, Cantor's Diagonal Argument.)
I did not much enjoy... (more) |
|
|
The Countess Conspiracy (2013) |
|
| Courtney Milan |
|
This is a romance novel set in Victorian England in which the heroine is a biologist studying inheritance and the hero is her friend who publishes and presents her work in his name. The story begins... (more) |
|
|
Counting on Frank (1990) |
|
| Rod Clement |
|
Lots of people seem to really like this
children's picture book about a boy who likes to ask (and answer) questions
like: "How long would it take to fill up the room with water if I left the
bathtub... (more) |
|
|
Crash Course in Romance (2023) |
|
| Je Won Yu (director) / Hee-Seung Yang (writer) |
|
A grocery store owner and a "celebrity" math teacher fall in love in this South Korean TV series. Each episode’s title is mathematical, and we get to see Choi Chi-yeol being treated like a rock star... (more) |
|
|
The Crime of the Mathematics Professor (1960) |
|
| Clarice Lispector |
|
There is very little mathematical content to this story of a math professor attempting to atone for having abandoned a pet dog. He is described (in the English translation) as having a "cold, mathematical... (more) |
|
|
Crimes and Math Demeanors (2007) |
|
| Leith Hathout |
|
The short mysteries in this book remind me of "Encyclopedia Brown". After a brief description of a sometimes contrived dilemma facing our young detective -- 14 year old Ravi -- you are given an opportunity... (more) |
|
|
The Crimson Cipher (2010) |
|
| Susan Page Davis |
|
A code breaker seeks to solve the mystery of the murder of her father, a math professor who had been working on an encryption device at the beginning of World War I in this "Christian adventure/romance". (more) |
|
|
Crunch (2003) |
|
| John Gould |
|
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... (more) |
|
|
Cryptology (2003) |
|
| Leonard Michaels |
|
You know how The New Yorker likes to publish vaguely bizarre short
stories that happen to take place in New York City? You know how lots of
authors who want to show a character who is afraid of "real... (more) |
|
|
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003) |
|
| Mark Haddon |
|
The narrator of this novel is Christopher Boone, an autistic teenager who is trying to figure out who killed his neighbor's dog. Although Christopher is very good at math, he is not very good at understanding... (more) |
|
|
The Cypher Bureau (2018) |
|
| Eilidh McGinness |
|
This work of historical fiction tells the story of Marian Rejewski, a Polish mathematician who used algebraic methods to break the Nazi Enigma code before the beginning of World War II. Most of the book... (more) |
|
|
The Da Vinci Code (2003) |
|
| Dan Brown |
|
The last act of a dying curator at the Louvre is an attempt to pass on, in code, a secret that he did not want to take to the grave. Among the things needed to "decode" this secret message is a recognition... (more) |
|
|
Dark Matter: The Private Life of Sir Isaac Newton (2002) |
|
| Philip Kerr |
|
A multiple-murder mystery which outlandishly casts Newton in the role of Sherlock Holmes during his tenure as Warden at the British Royal Mint (Watson is played Christopher Ellis, nephew of mathematician... (more) |
|
|
Dark of the Moon (1995) |
|
| John Dickson Carr |
|
The crime novel "Dark of the Moon" by John Dickson Carr has as one of its characters a female "mathematician", Camilla Bruce. (She is called a mathematician and is enthusiastic about the subject but... (more) |
|
|
De Impossibilitate Vitae and Prognoscendi (1971) |
|
| Stanislaw Lem |
|
This is a philosophical discourse (intended as a parody, but I swear
I've read serious papers that were very much like it) in which the
author argues that probablity theory makes no sense since it is... (more) |
|
|
Dead Ancients Trilogy (2008) |
|
| Peter Hobbs |
|
Pythagoras explains in first person his celebrated theorem, complete with diagrams and shaded triangles. It is a source of substantial chagrin to him because it naturally leads to the irrational numbers.... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Death and the Compass (La Muerte y La Brujula) (1968) |
|
| Jorge Luis Borges |
|
This is considered one of Borges' greatest short stories, and was even made into a film by "RepoMan" director Alex Cox. The following review from Alejandro Satz explains the mathematical content, but... (more) |
|
|
Death of a Doxy (1966) |
|
| Rex Stout |
|
The murder victim's brother-in-law is a high school math
teacher. Nero Wolfe believes this to be relevant at one
point, even quoting some mathematical history from an
encyclopedia.
I... (more) |
|
|
Death of an Avid Reader: A Kate Shackleton Mystery (2017) |
|
| Frances Brody |
|
A strangled body is found in a supposedly haunted library in England in the 1920's. It turns out to belong to Dr. Potter, a math professor known for being a stylish dandy as well as for his intelligence.... (more) |
|
|
The Death of Archimedes (1923) |
|
| Karel Capek |
|
As history usually tells the story, Archimedes is killed by a Roman
soldier who did not realize who he was. In this version, however, the
centurion is well aware of who he is speaking with. While he... (more) |
|
|
Deception (2003) |
|
| Eric Altman |
|
The differential geometer who has discovered a formula for the lifetime of tiny black holes is the only decent character in this book. That is not to say that the others are poorly written, just that... (more) |
|
|
The Decimal People (2022) |
|
| Zachary Shiffman |
|
This short story is narrated by a math teacher who frequently utilizes mathematical terminology and notation in his musings on the human condition. A key metaphor throughout the story is the idea that... (more) |
|
|
Decoded (2002) |
|
| Mai Jia |
|
This novel tells the story of Rong Jinzhen, a mathematical genius who becomes a cryptographer in Mao's secret intelligence agency.
The author, who is a well-known award-winning author in China, supposedly... (more) |
|
|
Deep Lay the Dead (1942) |
|
| Frederick C. Davis |
|
This is a decent but familiar and unremarkable murder mystery, the kind in which an odd assortment of people are trapped together in a house, not knowing which of them is the killer. In this case, they... (more) |
|
|
Delicious Rivers (2006) |
|
| Ellen Maddow |
|
This collage of absurd and entertaining scenes at a NYC post office (and the music and choreography to which they are performed) were all inspired by the mathematics of Penrose Tilings. In particular,... (more) |
|
|
The Deluge (2023) |
|
| Stephen Markley |
|
One character in this tome-sized political eco-thriller is Ashir al-Hasan. Ash, as he is called by friends, is a a government data analyst. Although he also appears to be "on the spectrum",
he is not... (more) |
|
|
A Deprogrammer's Tale (2000) |
|
| Colin Adams |
|
This spoof presents the attempts of math professors to convince students to become math majors and the subsequent interest of those students in math as if it were a religious cult. Told from the point... (more) |
|
|
Der Tag ohne Abend (The Day without Evening) (1925) |
|
| Leo Perutz |
|
Der Tag ohne Abend/The Day without Evening is a short story which
alludes to the life of Evariste Galois and to Augustine's theology.
Perutz' protagonist is called Georges Durval, he lives at the
beginning... (more) |
|
|
A Desirable Middle (2016) |
|
| Susan Sechrist |
|
In this story which appeared in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, a recently divorced woman contemplates her own tastes in things and seems especially concerned with the aspect ratios of the objects... (more) |
|
|
The Devotion of Suspect X [Yôgisha X no kenshin] (2005) |
|
| Keigo Higashino |
|
Reclusive high school math teacher Tetsuya Ishigami is "devoted" to two things: his math research and his neighbor, Yasuko Hanaoka. When Hanaoka and her daughter kill her abusive ex-husband, they are... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Diary of a Bad Year (2007) |
|
| John Maxwell Coetzee |
|
J.M. Coetzee has a Nobel Prize in literature (2003) and an undergraduate degree in mathematics (University of Cape Town, 1961). It is therefore not too surprising to find him included in my list of mathematical... (more) |
|
|
Digital Fortress (1996) |
|
| Dan Brown |
|
In a final act of defiance, a young Japanese genius threatens to make
public his "unbreakable code" if the NSA does not confess that it has been
reading even encrypted e-mails. The heroine of the story... (more) |
|
|
Dirac (2006) |
|
| Dietmar Dath |
|
The protagonist tries to write a novel
about the mathematician and physicist Paul Dirac. Excerpts from
Dirac's works and Geoffrey A. Landis' novel "Ripples in the Dirac
Sea" are implemented in the plot, so you can learn a lot about
mathematics and quantum physics.
(As far as I know, this novel is currently only available in the original German. Please correct me if I'm wrong.) (more) |
|
|
A Disappearing Number (2007) |
|
| Simon McBurney |
|
Scenes of Srinivasa Ramanujan's collaboration with G.H. Hardy around the time of World War I are mixed in with modern storylines including an Indian physicist who has applied Ramanujan's work to String... (more) |
|
|
Disciple of the Masses (2008) |
|
| Xujun Eberlein |
|
A pathos-filled short story set in rural China toward the end of Mao's Cultural Revolution. It captures beautifully the sense of loss inherent in a centrally-directed and enforced revolution, with the... (more) |
|
|
The Discovery of Heaven (1992) |
|
| Harry Mulisch |
|
This novel is considered to be the magnum opus of one of the
greats of Dutch postwar literature. (Original Dutch title _De Ontdekking van de Hemel_,
English translation 1996, film version in 2001)
_The... (more) |
|
|
The Distant Dead (2020) |
|
| Heather Young |
|
When a boy named Sal discovers the burned body of his middle school math teacher, two amateur sleuths try to determine who killed him. One of them is Jake, the volunteer fireman to whom Sal initially... (more) |
|
|
Divide Me By Zero (2019) |
|
| Lara Vapnyar |
|
Notes intended to be the outline for a math textbook by the narrator's mother instead give structure to her stories about her mother's death and her own love life.
Like the author, the character Katya... (more) |
|
|
The Divine Proportions of Luca Pacioli (2019) |
|
| W.A.W. Parker |
|
This novel is a biography of Fra Luca Pacioli in fictionalized form. Pacioli who lived from 1447 to 1517 was an Italian mathematician and Franciscan friar who authored one of the first printed mathematics... (more) |
|
|
Division by Zero (1991) |
|
| Ted Chiang |
|
Answers the question: what would happen if we found out that
mathematics is inconsistent? This is a great piece of
mathematical fiction. (Thanks to Frank Chess who pointed it out to
me.)
Renee... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Do the Math #2: The Writing on the Wall (2008) |
|
| Wendy Lichtman |
|
In this sequel to Do the Math: Secrets, Lies and Algebra, a middle school student who likes to think of things in terms of mathematical notation (for example, calling her friend Miranda "|m|" because she... (more) |
|
|
Do the Math: A Novel of the Inevitable (2008) |
|
| Philip Persinger |
|
A math graduate student becomes an intern for a math professor famous for his `theory of inevitability' but ends up also helping his wife (an even more famous author of romance novels) write a book using... (more) |
|
|
Do the Math: Secrets, Lies, and Algebra (2007) |
|
| Wendy Lichtman |
|
A math-loving eighth grader applies mathematical concepts to problems in her social life.
According to the book jacket, the author has a degree in mathematics and writes pieces for many periodicals.... (more) |
|
|
The Dobie Paradox (1993) |
|
| Desmond Cory |
|
Another Professor Dobie mystery (see also The
Catalyst and The Mask of Zeus) in which the so-called "Columbo with a chair in mathematics" solves the mystery of the murder of a young girl. There is less... (more) |
|
|
Domaine [Domain] (2009) |
|
| Patric Chiha (screenplay and director) |
|
This subtle, slow and depressing French film concerns the relationship between a homosexual teenager and his alcoholic aunt. She is a math professor whose research is connected to Gödel's Theorem, and... (more) |
|
|
Don Juan oder die Liebe zur Geometrie (1953) |
|
| Max Frisch |
|
In this German play, sometimes presented in English translation as "Don Juan or the Love of Geometry", the famous lover explains to the audience that the other authors who have written about him have gotten it all wrong; it is mathematics and not women that he truly loves.
Thanks to Thorben Brunschötte for bringing this work of mathematical fiction to my attention. (more) |
|
|
Double Digit (2014) |
|
| Annabel Monaghan |
|
This cleverly titled sequel to A Girl Named Digit follows the continuing adventures of a young "math whiz" whose talents make her both a weapon against and a target of terrorists. (more) |
|
|
A Doubter's Almanac (2016) |
|
| Ethan Canin |
|
This literary novel follows the life of the fictional mathematical genius Milo Andret from his youth in Michigan, though his education at Berkeley and the winning of a Fields Medal as a Princeton math... (more) |
|
|
Dr. Casey’s Temporization (1979) |
|
| Jean McGarry |
|
I could not quite understand this short story or its purpose. A mathematics professor has assigned some problem to students and during his student-visit hours (presumably), a female student shows up... (more) |
|
|
Dr. No: A Novel (2022) |
|
| Percival Everett |
|
Wala Kitu is a professor of mathematics at Brown University who specializes in nothing. (It is not that he doesn't have a specialty. He is an expert in the very concept of nothingness.) His best friends... (more) |
|
|
Duke with Benefits (Studies in Scandal) (2017) |
|
| Manda Collins |
|
A romance novel with a strong female lead, Lady Daphne Forsyth, who is a mathematician with some stereotypical anti-social traits. She has been set the task of solving an old mystery by breaking a cipher. However, since this is a romance novel, she is unsurprisingly distracted by a certain hunky guy, the "duke" of the title, whose family owns the library containing the cipher.
(more) |
|
|
D'Alembert's Principle: A Novel in Three Panels (2000) |
|
| Andrew Crumey |
|
A fictionalized presentation of the life (and love) of Jean le Rond
D'Alembert (1717-1783), best known -- to me at least -- as the first
to study and solve the famous linear wave equation u_xx + c u_tt = 0.
See the online
bookreview at at MAA Online. (more) |
|
|
Echoes from the Past (2006) |
|
| Edward Michel-Bird |
|
A young mathematics professor becomes involved in a mystery and a love affair when the identity of his true biological father is called into question. No mathematical ideas or results are discussed in... (more) |
|
|
The Eight (1989) |
|
| Katherine Neville |
|
This book really is AMAZING. I have read it numerous times and it always gets better. Math plays an important part in this story and the connections made in the plot are fascinating. This book is an... (more) |
|
|
The Eighth Detective (2020) |
|
| Alex Pavesi |
|
Many years ago, math professor Grant McCallister published a paper mathematically analyzing the structure of murder mystery fiction. He even self-published a collection of short stories illustrating several... (more) |
|
|
The Einstein Enigma (2010) |
|
| José Rodrigues Dos Santos |
|
An adventure novel whose MacGuffin is a proof of the existence of God, formulated and hidden by Albert Einstein. There is more talk than action, which may disappoint some readers.
For those interested... (more) |
|
|
El matemático (1988) |
|
| Arturo Azuela |
|
It is a kind of bildungsroman narrated by a sexagenarian mathematician who makes a mathematical discovery in the verge of the year 2000. Of course, there is the detail of considering the year 2000 the... (more) |
|
|
Electric (2004) |
|
| Chad Taylor |
|
Three of the characters in this novel are mathematicians. Sam is a former statistician who now works at a successful Auckland data retrieval company. Because he is attracted to the hydrodynamic equations... (more) |
|
|
An Elegant Solution (2013) |
|
| Paul Robertson |
|
A fictionalized account of the life of Leonhard Euler, focusing on his relationship with the Bernoullis and told from the perspective of Christian theology. The novel also takes on aspects of a murder... (more) |
|
|
Elegantly, In the Least Number of Steps (2012) |
|
| Monica McFawn |
|
A young man named Aaron who works at a company that releases butterflies at events is attacked and seriously wounded right after he finally finds a proof of the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture. That... (more) |
|
|
Elementary (Episode: Solve for X) (2013) |
|
| Jerry Levine (director)/Jeffrey Paul King (screenplay) |
|
In this episode from the second season of Elementary featuring a modern version of Sherlock Holmes with a female Watson, the duo discover equations in invisible ink on the walls in a murdered mathematician's... (more) |
|
|
The Elusive Bullet (1931) |
|
| John Rhode (aka Cecil John Charles Street) |
|
Dr. Priestly is a professor whose hobby is "the mathematical detection of crime". In this story, he must convince the police inspector that the man he plans to accuse of murder is, in fact, innocent.
The... (more) |
|
|
The Elusive Chauffeur (2008) |
|
| David H. Brown |
|
This mystery novel appears to have been conceived as a means for the author to "spread the word" about two things that are important to him: mathematics and his Christian faith. In it, a private detective... (more) |
|
|
The Embalmer's Book of Recipes (2009) |
|
| Ann Lingard |
|
An unusual and intimate novel that follows three women: a widowed sheep-farmer, a mathematician who studies quasicrystals, and a taxidermist (whose included blog entries explain the title of the book).... (more) |
|
|
Emilie (2010) |
|
| Kaija Saariaho (composer)/Amin Maalouf (libretto) |
|
In this opera, a single performer portrays the final days in the life of Émilie du Châtelet, whose promising career as a mathematical physicist in the 18th century was tragically cut short at the age of 42. Émilie du Châtelet's story is also told in two recent plays: see Emilie: La Marquise Du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight and Legacy of Light . (more) |
|
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|
|
Emmy Noether: The Mother of Modern Algebra (2008) |
|
| Margaret B.W. Tent |
|
A semi-fictional biography of Emmy Noether written for young adults.
The book has received positive reviews from many mathematicians who hope (as, one supposes, does the author) that young readers will... (more) |
|
|
En busca de Klingsor (In Search of Klingsor) (1999) |
|
| Jorge Volpi |
|
The story is highly mathematical, involving a German Character called Gustav
Links, though the main character is a young American physicist called Francis
Bacon (sounds good). The idea is that this... (more) |
|
|
Enchantress of Numbers: A Novel of Ada Lovelace (2017) |
|
| Jennifer Chiaverini |
|
This voluminous (448 page) work of historical fiction is told in first person from the perspective of Ada Byron King (Lady Lovelace) herself. Nevertheless, as the author can count on the reader to have... (more) |
|
|
The Engineer of Moonlight (1979) |
|
| Don DeLillo |
|
The aging mathematician Eric Lighter spends time with his assistant (James), wife (Maya), and ex-wife (Diana) who are all staying together at his home in this two act play.
Diana is shocked to learn... (more) |
|
|
Enigma (1995) |
|
| Robert Harris / Tom Stoppard |
|
In this this espionage story set in England's Bletchley Park at the height of the Second World War, Tom Jericho is a clever mathematician at the famous code breaking facility who -- either despite or because... (more) |
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|
|
Erasmus with Freckles [aka Dear Brigitte] (1963) |
|
| John Haase |
|
The novel Erasmus with Freckles (1963) about a college English professor who hates math and science whose son is a math prodigy, was adapted into the film Dear Brigitte (1965) and re-released as a novel... (more) |
|
|
The Escher Twist (2002) |
|
| Jane Langton |
|
Part of the author's Homer/Mary Kelly series of mysteries based in
Concord MA. The plot centers on a crystallographer falling in love
with a stranger at an exhibit of Escher work, and... (more) |
|
|
The Estimator (Georges) (2007) |
|
| Lynn Margulis |
|
Georges Standon computes the probabilities of unlikely events for a living, especially those relating to outer space, but this does not prepare him for the complications in his personal life when an old... (more) |
|
|
Eternal (2021) |
|
| Lisa Scottoline |
|
While living under the fascist regime of Mussolini in pre-war Rome, a Jewish prodigy attends university mathematics classes taught by Levi-Civita and forms one vertex of a "love triangle". The romance and the impact of anti-semitism on academia receive equal attention in this serious work of historical fiction from an author better known for light fare. (more) |
|
|
Euclid Alone (1975) |
|
| William F. Orr |
|
An administrator in the math department of a major research institute
has to decide how to handle a paper which proves the inconsistency of
Euclidean geometry.
Math is definitely central to this... (more) |
|
|
Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879) |
|
| Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) |
|
I have long known that mathematician Charles Dodgson, who wrote the famous Alice stories under the pseudonym "Lewis Carroll", also wrote a book defending Euclid's ancient text as the best for teaching... (more) |
|
|
Evariste Galois (1965) |
|
| Alexadre Astruc (writer and director) |
|
Short film about the romantic and tragic death of Galois, the young mathematician whose research laid the foundation for Group Theory. I haven't actually seen the film, but the following quote (stolen... (more) |
|
|
Evil Genius (2005) |
|
| Catherine Jinks |
|
I am pleased to report that the titular "evil genius" in this children's novel is not the stereotypical cold mathematician in so many other works of mathematical fiction. In fact, the title character... (more) |
|
|
The Expert (1999) |
|
| Lee Gruenfeld |
|
A techno-legal thriller centered on a trial over cryptographic
exportation. The chip in question uses properties of large Mersenne
primes to provide an unbreakable code. This explanation seems to... (more) |
|
|
A Fable for Moderns (1951) |
|
| Lord Dunsany |
|
A bank employee becomes bored with the restrictions of arithmetic and decides to let his mathematical computations enjoy the freedom of "modern" poets and artists. Although he loses his job at the bank,... (more) |
|
|
The Facts of Death (1998) |
|
| Raymond Benson |
|
Would you believe...James Bond battling a mathematical cult bent on world destruction? (It could happen.) In this latter day Bond novel, the villian is a dynamic leader of a cult who bases his teachings... (more) |
|
|
The Fall of a Sparrow (1998) |
|
| Robert Hellenga |
|
In this novel, a literature professor travels to Italy to testify at the trial of the terrorists who murdered his daughter in a 1980 train bombing. The only math in it appears because another one of his... (more) |
|
|
The Fall of Man In Wilmslow (2009) |
|
| David Lagercrantz |
|
Before he gained fame in the US as the Swedish author taking over the mystery series featuring the fictional heroine Lisbeth Sander, David Lagercrantz wrote this novel about the death of mathematician... (more) |
|
|
Falling Umbrella (2002) |
|
| Julia Whitty |
|
In this short story, an aging mathematician witnesses a woman with an umbrella jumping (falling?) off of the Golden Gate bridge. Mathematical terminology is tossed around reasonably well ("proofs by contradiction",... (more) |
|
|
False Witness (2007) |
|
| Randy D. Singer |
|
An espionage novel (with an embedded Christian religious message) about a mathematician's decryption algorithm with the potential to disrupt internet security.
(more) |
|
|
Family Ties (Episode: My Tutor) (1985) |
|
| Jace Richdale (Screenplay) / Sam Weisman (Director) |
|
I'm writing to bring your attention to a television episode for
possible addition to your mathematical fiction website. The television
show is "Family Ties" and the episode is entitled, "My Tutor".... (more) |
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|
|
|
|
The Favor (1994) |
|
| Donald Petrie (Director) / Sara Parriott (Writer) / Josann McGibbon (Writer) |
|
A romantic comedy in which a woman married to a math professor wonders what it would have been like to have been with her old boyfriend and so convinces her girlfriend to sleep with him and report back.... (more) |
|
|
Fear of Math (1985) |
|
| Peter Cameron |
|
A feather-touch story about a young woman who comes to New York to do an MBA - and has to pass a Calculus course, a pre-requisite for an MBA. A brief description of how utterly lost she is after her... (more) |
|
|
Fermat's Best Theorem (1995) |
|
| Janet Kagan |
|
A student comes up with what appears to be a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. So, she gives it to her professor hoping that he will find a mistake in it (see below). It turns out that the professor is... (more) |
|
|
Fermat's Cuisine [Fermat no Ryori] (2018) |
|
| Yugo Kobayashi |
|
This four-volume manga series (also recently adapted as a melodramatic Japanese television series) follows a student named Gaku who has given up on his dream to become a world-famous mathematician and... (more) |
|
|
Fermat's Legacy (1992) |
|
| Ian Randal Strock |
|
A funny little story about the slightly malicious reason why Fermat wrote his famous note about his Last Conjecture in the margin of a book. Should be taken as just a chuckle-worthy piece rather... (more) |
|
|
Fermat's Room (La Habitacion de Fermat) (2007) |
|
| Luis Piedrahita / Rodrigo Sopeña |
|
In this Spanish thriller, four mathematicians are invited to a booby trapped room where they must solve mathematical puzzles to prevent the walls from closing in and crushing them. This leaves them little... (more) |
|
|
The Fibonacci Confessions (2010) |
|
| Graham Wade |
|
A historical novel telling the life story of Leonardo Pisano, perhaps the most famous European mathematician of the Middle Ages, better known today as Fibonacci.
We know very little of the historical... (more) |
|
|
Final Exam (2011) |
|
| Robert Dawson |
|
A math professor nearing retirement and displeased with trends in academia decides to use his final exam (the last he will ever give) to get his revenge on the cheating students in his calculus class.... (more) |
|
|
Final Integer (2021) |
|
| Thomas Reed Willemain |
|
In this short story, a number theorist is obsessed with one number, the date of his own death:
It has been said that number theory was once the purest of pure math. But in David’s academic circle,... (more) |
|
|
The Finan-seer (1949) |
|
| Edward L. Locke |
|
I have to admit that this particular story blew me away for multiple reasons. It is one of the most mathematical of tales ever to appear in pulp magazines, and pound-for-pound in terms of length (so... (more) |
|
|
The First Circle (1968) |
|
| Alexandr Solzhenitsyn |
|
Solzhenitsyn had been a math major until Hitler and Stalin came up
with a different career path for him, and TFC is based on his own
brief stay in the luxury side of the Gulag, which he claims saved
his... (more) |
|
|
The First Task of My Internship (2020) |
|
| Ziyin Xiong |
|
In this short piece (which is more of an extended joke than a story), the narrator is tasked with devising a method to literally fulfill The Olive Garden's promise of "unlimited breadsticks". Some of... (more) |
|
|
The Five Hysterical Girls Theorem (2000) |
|
| Rinne Groff |
|
I think this play about a number theory conference at the British seaside at the turn of the 20th century may be misunderstood. The plot revolves around the neuroses of the senior researcher, Moses Vazsonyi,... (more) |
|
|
Flame War: A Cyberthriller (1997) |
|
| Joshua Quittner / Michelle Slatalla |
|
A brilliant math professor invents a code that even the government will not be able to break. When he dies in an explosion, his daughter and the law student who (unknowingly) delivered the bomb that killed him work together to bring the killers to justice. (more) |
|
|
Flea Circus: A Brief Bestiary of Grief (2012) |
|
| Mandy Keifetz |
|
A mathematically inclined woman deals with her grief over the suicide of her lover, an entomologist who runs a flea circus, in this award winning novel.
Although the cover summary describes her as a... (more) |
|
|
Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria (2009) |
|
| Ki Longfellow |
|
Another novel about the historical figure Hypatia of Alexandria whose murder by Christian zealots as the Ancient Greek culture faded away makes her a good subject for authors with certain political and... (more) |
|
|
Flowers Stained with Moonlight (2005) |
|
| Catherine Shaw |
|
In this sequel to The Three-Body Problem, Vanessa Duncan is called upon to save an innocent young woman, falsely suspected of murdering her older and unlikable husband. Although there is no mathematics... (more) |
|
|
Folk Music Festivals
and Mathematics
Conferences (2015) |
|
| Erik Talvila |
|
The narrator in this work of mathematical fiction attends both a music festival and a math research conference. This allows the author, a math professor at the University of the Fraser Valley, to compare... (more) |
|
|
Forever Changes (2008) |
|
| Brendan Halpin |
|
A very somber novel written for young adults about a mathematically talented teenager with cystic fibrosis. Her math teacher helps comfort her by making an analogy between the important role of the infinitesimals in calculus and the importance of even a short life. (more) |
|
|
The Forever Marriage (2012) |
|
| Ann Bauer |
|
The unlikeable and unfaithful wife of a math professor only learns to appreciate the husband she never loved after his untimely death. The mathematician is humble but otherwise stereotypically brilliant (offered full professorships immediately upon receiving his PhD), unemotional and unromantic. (more) |
|
|
|
|
La formule de Stokes, roman (2016) |
|
| Michèle Audin |
|
The author, a professional mathematician as well as a member of the Oulipo literary group, wrote this unusual novel whose protagonist is not a person or animal but a formula. At least, that is what I... (more) |
|
|
The Four Colors of Summer (2011) |
|
| Tefcros Michaelides |
|
Multi-generational love stories are interwoven with the history of the Four Color Theorem, including the controversies surrounding its computer-assisted proof.
This novel was published in Greek and... (more) |
|
|
The Four-Color Puzzle: Falling Off the Map (2013) |
|
| Lior Samson |
|
A math professor becomes intrigued with a high school student he meets at an online tutoring site when she presents him with what appears to be a short and very clever proof of the four-color theorem.... (more) |
|
|
The Fourth Quadrant (2011) |
|
| Dorothy Lumley |
|
The story has some elements of mathematics built in. A ransom note coded into a ciphered message broken up on paper in 4 quadrants, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, references to the Difference Engine.... (more) |
|
|
The Fractal Murders (2001) |
|
| Mark Cohen |
|
In this award winning (Top Ten Mysteries on the Book Sense 76 Fall List for 2002) mystery novel "Hard-Boiled" Detective Pepper Keane is hired by a tall and attractive math professor (with whom he of course... (more) |
|
|
Fractions (2011) |
|
| Buzz Mauro |
|
A math teacher realizes that the father of one of his students is a man with whom he has had an anonymous sexual relationship. There is some discussion of math education in general, and about hypothetical... (more) |
|
|
The Franklin's Tale (in The Canterbury Tales) (1390) |
|
| Geoffrey Chaucer |
|
Aurelius of Brittany greatly desires Dorigen, a married woman who has
not seen her husband, the knight, for some years. Dorigen puts off
Aurelius's advances by promising that she will yield when he... (more) |
|
|
A Frayed Knot (2009) |
|
| Felix Culp |
|
Culp takes a classic mystery by Poe and retells it with knotted ropes taking the place of people. For example:
Tyler Trefoil was a Bowline knot....Salty-fibered seafaring knots such as Trefoil - as... (more) |
|
|
The French Mathematician (1998) |
|
| Tom Petsinis |
|
A fictionalized account (in first person) of the life and untimely
death of Evariste Galois, originator of the mathematical subject now
known as group theory.
This is a story about a mathematician,... (more) |
|
|
Freud's Megalomania: A Novel (2001) |
|
| Israel Rosenfield |
|
This is an intriguing piece of work, mixing fact
with fiction and different styles (from the scientific essay to
the diary), probably best understood as an ironic look upon the
"Freud wars".... (more) |
|
|
Frobenius: A Sesquilogue (1996) |
|
| Lee Rudolph |
|
A fictionalized account of the life of Hamilton as remembered by
Frobenius (in verse). (A slightly different version was published in
the Mathematical Intelligencer.)
(more) |
|
|
Fruits of Perseverance (1841) |
|
| Anonymous |
|
This short story does not have a specific plot which threads in mathematical ideas. It is much more a “Math Sermon”, deployed by a caring mother to instill a value system in her young child.... (more) |
|
|
Furuhata Ninzaburô (Episode 13) (1995) |
|
| Kôki Mitani |
|
In the last episode of the first season of this popular Japanese detective show, the inspector must solve the mystery of the murder of an award-winning mathematician. It turns out that the murderer was... (more) |
|
|
För immer in Honig (Forever in Honey) (2005) |
|
| Dietmar Dath |
|
Site visitor Hauke Reddmann writes from Germany to tell me about this experimental German novel which includes diagrams from category theory. (For those who might not know, category theory is an abstract... (more) |
|
|
G103 (2006) |
|
| Oliver Tearne (director) |
|
This short film "shows a surreal day in the life of a mathematics undergraduate" taking the math course G103 at the University of Warwick. In fact, the Website makes it sound as if it is an informational... (more) |
|
|
Galileo (1938) |
|
| Bertolt Brecht |
|
Of course, Brecht's biographical play takes more of a political than a mathematical view of the life of the famous astronomer/mathematician. Note that Joseph Losey, who directed the first American production... (more) |
|
|
Gambler's Rose (2000) |
|
| G.W. Hawkes |
|
A picaresque novel about the Halloran family who live by grifting. Charging lunch to their room in a hotel where they aren't staying and winning a fabulous yacht in a game of poker are the high points,... (more) |
|
|
Gaming Instinct (Spieltrieb) (2004) |
|
| Juli Zeh |
|
[The math in this novel which was a best seller in Germany in 2004 is]
recognizable not only for experts, so it is mentioned in almost every
review. Zeh learned about game theory and the prisoner's... (more) |
|
|
The Gangs of New Math (2005) |
|
| Robert W. Vallin |
|
This humorous short story about a brawl in a pub of mathematicians appeared in the November 2005 issue of Math Horizons magazine. There is quite a bit of "mathematical name-dropping" in the form of quick... (more) |
|
|
Gauntlet (2009) |
|
| Richard Aaron |
|
Autistic mathematician, Hamilton Turbee, helps stop a terrorist plot.
The book has received praise for its portrayal of an autism and as a thriller. Of course, I like to see mathematicians portrayed... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Geek Abroad (2008) |
|
| Piper Banks |
|
Miranda Bloom, the mathematical prodigy first introduced in Geek High returns in another novel for teenagers, this time emphasizing her participation in mathematical competitions. For instance, we see... (more) |
|
|
Geek High (2007) |
|
| Piper Banks |
|
Miranda Bloom is a mathematically talented girl trying to deal with normal teenage problems (family, boys, etc.) Although mental calculations have always come easy to Miranda, she does not appear to be... (more) |
|
|
The Genius (1901) |
|
| Nikolai Georgievich Garin-Mikhailovskii |
|
The Russian Engineer N.G. Mikhailovskii (1852-1906) was also an accomplished author using the pseudonym "N.G. Garin". His short story, "The Genius", tells about an Jewish man who fills his notebooks with... (more) |
|
|
Geometria dell'apocalisse (1999) |
|
| Marco Abate (writer) / R. Bogagni (artist) |
|
Italian comic book whose title translates as "Geometry of the Apocalypse".
A (definitely not successful, if I may say so myself) attempt of mixing fractals, impossible murders, racial issues, voodoo gods and the wonderful city of Venice. Remember the city, and forget this story.
Published in
Lazarus Ledd 68, Star Comics, Perugia, 1999, 95 pp (more) |
|
|
Geometric Regional Novel (1969) |
|
| Gert Jonke |
|
An odd but charming book which describes a dreamy, strange, very static, grey world nestled in some corner of thought. In measured, clipped tones, the narrator describes the mathematically precise contours... (more) |
|
|
The Geometrics of Johnny Day (1941) |
|
| Nelson Bond |
|
Old MacDonald had a firm, and in that firm he had a young mathematician who wanted to win his daughter's hand in marriage. MacDonald was skeptical:
""Ye want a job, eh? And just what is it that ye... (more) |
|
|
|
|
The Geometry of Love (1966) |
|
| John Cheever |
|
An engineer is inspired by a passing truck from "Euclid's Dry Cleaning" to apply geometric principles to his own marital problems. He finds that interpreting his family as a triangle has the advantage... (more) |
|
|
The Geometry of Narrative (1983) |
|
| Hilbert Schenck |
|
This story begins with a character who is a graduate student of English proposing to his professor a new geometric approach to literary analysis. As he points out, this has been used to some limited degree... (more) |
|
|
The Geometry of Sisters (2009) |
|
| Luanne Rice |
|
Young Beck hopes her mathematical skills will somehow bring back her dead father. Other reviewers have mostly complained that this novel does not work as the serious family drama it intends to be. From... (more) |
|
|
Getting Rid of Fluff (1908) |
|
| Ellis Parker Butler |
|
A humorous story in which two men formulate a mathematical "law of scared dogs" to help in frightening away an annoying dog named Fluff.
"I bet if Sir Isaac Newon had had Fluff as long as you have had... (more) |
|
|
Getting Somewhere (1995) |
|
| Jenny Pausacker |
|
In this Australian novel for teenagers, a student who lives in the shadow of her twin is able to find her own identity and some self-respect with the help of a maths teacher. The teacher challenges her... (more) |
|
|
Getting the Combination (1982) |
|
| Isaac Asimov |
|
Griswold figures out a combination by correctly guessing
the next number in a sequence.
AKA "Playing the Numbers". Published originally in the June 1982 issue of Gallery.
(more) |
|
|
Ghost Dancer [a.k.a. Dance of Death] (2006) |
|
| John Case |
|
The blurb on the cover describes anti-hero Jack Wilson as a "brilliant mathematician" and also a "diabolical madman" in this thriller based on the popular conspiracy theory claiming that Nikola Tesla is... (more) |
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|
Gifted (2017) |
|
| Marc Webb (director) / Tom Flynn (writer) |
|
Mary is a seven year old math prodigy being raised by her uncle (Chris Evans from Captain America) after her mother's suicide. The uncle believes he is following his sister's wishes by trying to raise... (more) |
|
|
Gifted: A Novel (2007) |
|
| Nikita Lalwani |
|
This novel tells the coming-of-age story of a girl whose Indian father is a professor of mathematics in Wales. She is talented at mathematics and even uses sophisticated math in her everyday life (e.g.... (more) |
|
|
The Gigantic Fluctuation (1973) |
|
| Arkady Strugatsky / Boris Strugatsky |
|
This is an oddly funny story about a man who becomes the "focus point of all miracles in the world", a "gigantic fluctuation". He somehow appears to attract extremely improbably but possible statistical... (more) |
|
|
The Girl in the Painting (2020) |
|
| Tea Cooper |
|
Jane Piper and Elizabeth Quinn are both interested in mathematics in this historical fiction novel which bounces back and forth between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Quinn arrives... (more) |
|
|
A Girl Named Digit (2012) |
|
| Annabel Monaghan |
|
A girl nicknamed "Digit" by her classmates because of her mathematical abilities and interests discovers a terrorist plot and begins working with the FBI to catch a double agent in this adventure aimed... (more) |
|
|
The Girl Who Loved Mathematics (1988) |
|
| Elizabeth Smithers |
|
A sad tale of a college girl, Gilberte (not her true name), who has a penchant for mathematics, having inherited from her father “who was was some high official who presumably dealt with estimates... (more) |
|
|
The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009) |
|
| Stieg Larsson |
|
In this sequel to the stunningly popular The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the self-taught, nearly autistic, young genius, Lisbeth Salander, once again becomes involved in a thrilling mystery allied with... (more) |
|
|
The Givenchy Code (2005) |
|
| Julie Kenner |
|
You've got to love the tag lines for this book: "A heel-breaking adventure in code-breaking that will bring out the math geek and the fashionista in you". "Cryptography is the new black".
A woman with... (more) |
|
|
Die Gleichung des Lebens [The Equation of Life] (2017) |
|
| Norman Ohler |
|
This German novel is based on the true story of Leonhard Euler being assigned by Frederick the Great to supervise the draining of the Oderbruch marshlands near Berlin. From reviews I have read, I know... (more) |
|
|
Go, Little Book (1972) |
|
| Isaac Asimov |
|
Combinatorics is used to break a "matchbook code".
One of the "Black Widower" mysteries written for Ellery Queen magazine.
See also these [2, 3] other BW stories. (more) |
|
|
God and Stephen Hawking (2000) |
|
| Robin Hawdon |
|
Although most people know him as a "scientist", Stephen Hawking is probably the best known living mathematician. (Technically, he is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University.) This play examines his life and work.
(more) |
|
|
God Doesn't Shoot Craps (2006) |
|
| Richard Armstrong |
|
Danny Pellegrino is a con artist who joins up with inventor/genius Virgil Kirk to market a mathematical get-rich-quick scheme which, amazingly, actually works.
The gambling scheme which Kirk calls... (more) |
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Going Out (2002) |
|
| Scarlett Thomas |
|
A group of unusual friends go on a journey to Wales to meet with a healer who they hope can help each of them with their problems. The group consists of Luke (who is unable to go outside due to allergies... (more) |
|
|
The Gold Cup (2000) |
|
| Lucas Reiner |
|
A character study of the patrons in a Los Angeles coffee shop, including Jack, a mathematician. Jack is widowed, anti-social, and spends his time trying to "penetrate zero". (more) |
|
|
The Gold-Bug (1843) |
|
| Edgar Allan Poe |
|
Not only does this very famous Poe story contain a (very little) bit of mathematics in the form of a probabilistic approach to cryptography and a geometric description of the treasure hunt on the ground... (more) |
|
|
Golden Math [Suugaku Golden] (2019) |
|
| Kuramaru Tatsuhiko |
|
Haruichi Onoda is a high school student who aspires to represent Japan in the IMO (International Mathematical Olympiad). He meets a girl (Mami Nanase) who shares his passion. Though seemingly airheaded,... (more) |
|
|
Goldman's Theorem (2009) |
|
| R.J. Stern |
|
Hired by the little-known "University of Northern Vermont", Professor Goldman does not seem to be living up to his promise as a great math researcher. Under pressure from his superiors, he claims to have... (more) |
|
|
Good Benito (1994) |
|
| Alan P. Lightman |
|
This novel presents many instances in the life of mathematical physicist
Bennett Lang, the "Benito" of the title. The different scenes, presented
non-chronologically, cover most of his life from early... (more) |
|
|
A Good Problem to Have (2014) |
|
| B.J. Novak |
|
A fourth grade math class is interrupted by an old man who bursts in claiming that he was the inventor of the train problem:
"That's my problem," said the man.
He stared at us all at once, somehow,... (more) |
|
|
Good Will (1989) |
|
| Jane Smiley |
|
A poor couple living on a rural farm deal with the intrusions of the "outside world", including an affluent and worldly African-American math professor and her young daughter.
I don't think there... (more) |
|
|
Good Will Hunting (1997) |
|
| Gus Van Sant (director) / Matt Damon (Screenplay) |
|
A young janitor at MIT solves a (supposedly) difficult problem left on
a black board by a Fields medalist. This successful film did make
many more people aware of the existence of the Fields medal.... (more) |
|
|
Gospel Truths (2007) |
|
| J.G. Sandom |
|
Another novel in the same genre as The Da Vinci Code — an Earth-shaking secret which can destroy the Roman Catholic Church (as a character says, “Can you imagine the headline? ‘Christ... (more) |
|
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Gravity's Rainbow (1973) |
|
| Thomas Pynchon |
|
In this novel "there's "mathematicians'
graffiti" and a lot of musing on the Poisson-curve. See, for ex. page 140 in
the Pengiun 20th century classics edition.
I was impressed with Pynchon's... (more) |
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|
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Gut Symmetries (1997) |
|
| Jeanette Winterson |
|
Two love affairs: one between a pair of physicists and the other between
the female physicist and her lovers wife. (The author presents this
analogy: A love triangle reduced to a line.)
It is often... (more) |
|
|
Gödel, Escher Bach: an eternal golden braid (1979) |
|
| Douglas Hofstadter |
|
Pulitzer Prize wining book whose chapters alternate between fictional
"dialogues" and more standard non-fiction format to present ideas from
philosophy, art, music and psychology as well as mathematical... (more) |
|
|
Hajime's Algorithm (2017) |
|
| Mihara Kazuto |
|
A bitter old mathematician discovers a young prodigy while visiting the little Japanese island where he grew up in this ten volume manga series that ran from 2017-2020.
Uchida Yutaka is a mathematician... (more) |
|
|
Hamlet and Pfister Forms - A Tragedy in Four Acts (1992) |
|
| Jan Minac |
|
An absurd combination of comedy, advanced mathematics, and Shakespearean tragedy by Western University math professor Ján Mináč which was performed at the mathematical institute in Oberwolfach,... (more) |
|
|
Hannah, Divided (2002) |
|
| Adele Griffin |
|
The story of a 13 year old girl living in rural Pennsylvania in 1934,
"Hannah" presents us with yet another fictional account of someone who is
not only talented in mathematics but also psychologically... (more) |
|
|
Hapgood (1988) |
|
| Tom Stoppard |
|
A brief discussion of Euler's solution to the Königsburg Bridge Problem appears in Stoppard's play about espionage and quantum physics.
When a British physicist double-agent is accused of giving... (more) |
|
|
The Happy Numbers of Julius Miles (2013) |
|
| Jim Keeble |
|
The characters in this twisted tale include a transexual "Cupid" with a drug problem, a crooked businessman, a Somali babysitter, a four-year old boy of unknown paternity, a London police officer, the... (more) |
|
|
Hard Times (1853) |
|
| Charles Dickens |
|
A suggestion for a novel to be added to your website Mathematical Fiction:
In Charles Dickens's "Hard Times", poor schoolgirl Sissy Jupe is struggling in an educational system
that is obsessed... (more) |
|
|
The Helpline (2019) |
|
| Katherine Collette |
|
In this work of fiction, an anti-social character who believes that all of life's questions can be answered by mathematics discovers that there's more to life than numbers. In this particular version... (more) |
|
|
Herr Doctor's Wondrous Smile (1998) |
|
| Vladimir Tasic |
|
In this short story, a logician who really does not take the superstitions
of numerology seriously is invited to a "fringe" conference where he
delivers a talk on the mystical implications of Gregory... (more) |
|
|
Het gemillimeterde hoofd (The Cropped Head) (1967) |
|
| Gerrit Krol |
|
It was published in 1967 by Querido, Amsterdam, and seems to
have been translated into Italian (La testa millimetrata). There is a
lot of mathematics in this experimental novel (Hans Freudenthal
judged:... (more) |
|
|
Hickory Dickory Shock! The Tale of Techies (2010) |
|
| Sundip Gorai |
|
This novel, which the author tells me is a best-seller in India, is a mystery thriller whose protagonist is a young man named "210". In the first chapter, which is available for free at the book's official... (more) |
|
|
Hidden Figures (2016) |
|
| Allison Schroeder (writer) / Theodore Melfi (director and writer) |
|
Hidden Figures is a "Hollywood-ized" version of the true story of three women who worked in the "colored computers" unit at NASA's Langley Research Center. In particular, it follows Katherine (Goble)... (more) |
|
|
A Higher Geometry (2006) |
|
| Sharelle Byars Moranville |
|
A teenage girl in the 1950's pursues her dream of becoming a mathematician in the American midwest over a background of sexism, romance and Cold War politics. This fictional account mirrors some of the... (more) |
|
|
A Hill on the Dark Side of the Moon (1983) |
|
| Lennart Hjulström |
|
A Swedish film about the life of Sonia Kovalevsky. The title refers,
apparently, to a site on the moon which was actually named in her
honor. The film tends to avoid the mathematics (for example, melodramatic... (more) |
|
|
Hinton (2020) |
|
| Mark Blacklock |
|
Charles Howard Hinton was a controversial mathematician working in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Howard Hinton, as he was known, studied and wrote about "the fourth dimension" and is best known... (more) |
|
|
Hole in the Paper Sky (2008) |
|
| Howard Kingkade (Screenplay) / Bill Purple (Director) |
|
An anti-social mathematics graduate student is forced to take a job in his university's psychology department where he gets to know a dog used for laboratory experiments. In risking all to save the dog,... (more) |
|
|
Holy Disorders (1945) |
|
| Edmund Crispin |
|
Edmund
Crispin, pseudonym of Bruce Montgomery is generally considered the last of the British high literate mystery writers. He wrote a series of mysteries starring Gervase Fen, Oxford don, highly... (more) |
|
|
Homage (1995) |
|
| Ross Kagan Marks (director) / Mark Medoff (screenplay) |
|
This film (and the 1994 play "The Homage that Follows" on which it was based) explores the mind of a murderer, who in this case happens to be a man with a Ph.D. in mathematics. He turns down a position... (more) |
|
|
A House for Living (2020) |
|
| Nicolette Polek |
|
A very short story (not quite two pages) about an insecure mathematician:
The mathematician moves into a glass condominium with fourteen doors and has nightmares about the rooms behind them switching... (more) |
|
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|
|
The Hurricane (2016) |
|
| R.J. Prescott |
|
A British novel in which a shy math student, damaged by her past, begins an unlikely romance with a powerful boxer. "Hurricane" O'Connell is handsome, muscular, and dangerous, but also happens to be madly... (more) |
|
|
Hypatia or The Divine Algebra (2000) |
|
| Mac Wellman |
|
Artistically produced off-Broadway play about the famous female
mathematician who was tortured to death by Christian monks in the 5th
Century. In Wellman's unusual telling, however, Hypatia ends up... (more) |
|
|
Hypatia: New Foes with an Old Face (1852) |
|
| Charles Kingsley |
|
A fictionalized account of the life and murder of the ancient Greek mathematician Hypatia. This
book, written in 1852 by Reverend Kingsley, focuses more on the
religious implications (especially the... (more) |
|
|
I Had to Call In a Mathematician (2019) |
|
| Erik Talvila |
|
This short story published in the Mathematical Intelligencer answers the age old question "What if math was more like plumbing?"
“Hi Janice. It's Mort. I've got another problem here and I've... (more) |
|
|
I Married You for Happiness (2011) |
|
| Lily Tuck |
|
A bittersweet and beautiful work of literature in which an artist sitting beside the corpse of her recently deceased mathematician husband recalls snippets of their lives: how they met, conceiving and... (more) |
|
|
I padroni del caos (2003) |
|
| A. Russo (writer) / Esposito Brothers (artists) |
|
An Italian comic book whose title translates as "Masters of Chaos".
Not much mathematics in here, but several of the characters are mathematicians. They've better
not talk about mathematics (the writer... (more) |
|
|
Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in his Labyrinth (1951) |
|
| Jorge Luis Borges |
|
Two friends, a poet and a mathematician (who is described as the author of a study on "the theorem which Fermat did not write in the margin of a page of Diophantus") arrive at an abandoned house in the... (more) |
|
|
L' idée fixe du Savant Cosinus (1899) |
|
| Christophe -- Georges Colomb |
|
This humorous and profusely illustrated French book is considered to be an early example of what we might today call a "comic book".
Cosinus is a mathematician who
desperately wants to travel around... (more) |
|
|
The Idiot (2017) |
|
| Elif Batuman |
|
A farce about a Turkish-American Harvard freshman. As she is trying to figure out who she is and what academia is about, she meets an older math major with whom she develops both a romantic and intellectual... (more) |
|
|
Im Schatten des Regenbogens (1993) |
|
| Helga Königsdorf |
|
Desillusioned after
the fall of communism, several academicans are willlessly
"abgewickelt" (read: annexed and thrown onto the scrap heap)
by the Western "invaders".
Contains a few references to her old "Lemma 1", a mention
of the Mandelbrot set and a short discussion of the pattern
paradox (1,2,3,4,5,6 in lottery is as probable as any other
combination drawn).
(more) |
|
|
The Imaginary Number (1956) |
|
| Yizhak Oren |
|
In this peculiar and humorous story, a complete stranger
shows up at physicist Benjamin's door, with an imaginary
tale of their childhood friendship, marriage to twin sisters,
and his deed to certain... (more) |
|
|
The Imitation Game (2014) |
|
| Morten Tyldum (director) / Graham Moore (screenplay) |
|
This film about Alan Turing and his role in breaking the Nazi enigma code has been a critical and financial success. It has won numerous awards and brought huge crowds of people to see a movie about a... (more) |
|
|
Imperativ (1982) |
|
| Krzysztof Zanussi |
|
It is about a mathematician (a probability professor) in existential crisis about the nature of necessity and chance.
(more) |
|
|
In Good King Charles's Golden Days (1939) |
|
| George Bernard Shaw |
|
Considered by many to be Shaw's worst play, this late example of his
witty writing may be of special interest to visitors to this site. It
takes place at the home of Sir Isaac Newton where he is joined... (more) |
|
|
In Our Prime [I-sang-han na-ra-eui su-hak-ja] (2022) |
|
| Lee Yong-jae (screenwriter) / Dong-hoon Park (director) |
|
A poor student at an expensive South Korean academy receives much needed math tutoring (and a place to stay) from the school's security guard. The student later discovers that the security guard is in... (more) |
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|
|
In the Light of What We Know (2014) |
|
| Zia Haider Rahman |
|
The plot of this novel involves the financial industry around the time of the 2008 crash, Afghanistan after the American invasion, and the romance between a very clever man who grew up poor in Bangladesh... (more) |
|
|
In the Shadow of Gotham (2009) |
|
| Stefanie Pintoff |
|
The first victim in this murder mystery is a female math grad student at Columbia University in the year 1905. I'm sure many of the fans of this Edgar Award winning first-novel would mention the historical... (more) |
|
|
Incendies (2010) |
|
| Denis Villeneuve / Valérie Beaugrand-Champagne / Wajdi Mouawad |
|
After their mother is struck speechless at a pool, resulting in her hospitalization and then her death, twins Jeanne and Simon are given two sealed envelopes and told to deliver them to the father they... (more) |
|
|
Incompleteness (2004) |
|
| Apostolos Doxiadis |
|
A play by the author of Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture on the last, sad days in the life of Kurt Gödel. After a "workshop production" in Athens, Greece (June 24-28, 2003) the show's official... (more) |
|
|
The Indian Clerk (2007) |
|
| David Leavitt |
|
Acclaimed author, Leavitt, presents a fictionalized version of one of the most famous "human interest stories" in mathematical history: the short life and career of Srinivasa Ramanujan. Focusing largely... (more) |
|
|
Infinite Jest (1996) |
|
| David Foster Wallace |
|
The twenty page passage on Eschaton, with the Mean
Value Theorem footnote, is possibly the best use of mathematics in fiction I've
ever seen.
this book has some of the most interesting and complete... (more) |
|
|
The Infinite Pieces of Us (2018) |
|
| Rebekah Crane |
|
Esther's family moves from California to New Mexico after she becomes pregnant while still in school. The main focus of this young adult novel is on her personal relationships (with the baby's father,... (more) |
|
|
Infinite Sum (2016) |
|
| Sheila Deeth |
|
Although trained as a mathematician and happily married, Sylvia has psychological issues that are interfering with her life. The main focus of this novel is on her interactions with her therapist in which... (more) |
|
|
The Infinite Tides (2012) |
|
| Christian Kiefer |
|
A somber novel about an astronaut whose daughter dies tragically and wife leaves him while he is in space. Since he and his daughter were both mathematical prodigies, for whom math was not only a beloved... (more) |
|
|
Infinitely Near (1999) |
|
| Anthony Cristiano |
|
An 8 minute long, black and white film with no dialogue showing intertwined scenes of a student having trouble with the concept of a limit in his calculus class and other scenes from his life. The director... (more) |
|
|
The Infinities (2010) |
|
| John Banville |
|
As mathematician Adam Godley lies seemingly unconscious and dying in bed, his family and professional rival wander through his home.
The title is a reference to the computational anomalies in quantum... (more) |
|
|
Infinity (1996) |
|
| Patricia Broderick |
|
It's about the early years of Richard Feynman, up to the completion
of the Manhattan Project, and the death of his wife.
What I like particularily is a scene in NY's Chinatown where [Feynman]
races... (more) |
|
|
The Ingenious Mr. Spinola (1924) |
|
| Ernest Bramah |
|
Max Carrados is a blind amateur detective genius, quite popular in the early 20th century, but mostly forgotten since then. (Such is also the fate of E.B.'s Kai Lung fantasy stories.)
... (more) |
|
|
Inquirendo Island (1886) |
|
| Hudor Genone |
|
A very long, thinly disguised satire on sectarian splits in Religion, fairly nicely written. A man lost at sea is ship-wrecked on an island called “Inquirendo Island”, probably a sarcastic... (more) |
|
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|
|
An Instance of the Fingerpost (1999) |
|
| Iain Pears |
|
A murder mystery set in Oxford in the 1660's. Mathematician John
Wallis plays a major role as a character in the book (and Newton a
small role). See the review at MAA
online.
A very fine piece... (more) |
|
|
The Intangible (2022) |
|
| C.J. Washington |
|
Amanda is a data scientist who continues to show signs of pregnancy even after her miscarriage. Marissa is a math professor overwhelmed with guilt after a fatal accident. Their husbands are both non-mathematicians... (more) |
|
|
Into Thin Air (2000) |
|
| Colin Adams |
|
This was the first of Colin Adams' ``Mathematically Bent'' columns for the Mathematical Intelligencer, published back in Vol.22, No. 1, 2000. It combines many of the analogies between mountain climbing... (more) |
|
|
|
|
The Invention of Ana [Forestillinger om Ana Ivan] (2016) |
|
| Mikkel Rosengaard |
|
A Danish writer visiting New York becomes obsessed with the life story of Ana Ivan, a Romanian artist that he meets. She tells him about two lovers, about her parents' lives under the autocratic rule... (more) |
|
|
The Invention of Zero [Die Erfindung der Null] (2020) |
|
| Michael Wildenhain |
|
This German novel records a "game of cat and mouse" between a prosecutor and a suspected murderer, who happens to be a mathematician. The young prosecutor tries to prove that Martin Gödeler, who holds... (more) |
|
|
Invisible (2014) |
|
| James Patterson / David Ellis |
|
The (somewhat unlikeable) protagonist of this thriller is an FBI agent who loved numbers as a little girl and still prefers statistical analysis of data to time spent with other people. Combining this anti-social behavior with an obsessive desire to find a pattern among a huge number of unsolved murders leads her to begin her own investigation. (more) |
|
|
An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) |
|
| Aimee Bender |
|
Mona Gray is a second grade math teacher for whom math is not only a
job, but a beloved friend, an obsession and a security blanket. In this first novel we
learn about the events that have shaped her... (more) |
|
|
Invisibly Breathing (2019) |
|
| Eileen Merriman |
|
Felix Catalan, a teenager whose autistic tendencies make him unpopular in school, becomes romantically involved with another student whose stutter similarly makes him an outcast.
Like many other anti-social... (more) |
|
|
iPhone SE (2022) |
|
| Weike Wang |
|
Without being asked to do so, a Chinese-American woman's malfunctioning smartphone assistant begins teaching her about math, starting with the importance of the number zero and going up to solving systems... (more) |
|
|
Irrational Numbers (2008) |
|
| Robert Spiller |
|
Another mystery about high school math teacher Bonnie Pinkwater by the author of Witch of Agnesi. Like the others in this series, this is a murder mystery with adult themes (violence, homosexuality, etc.)... (more) |
|
|
The Ishango Bone (2012) |
|
| Paul Hastings Wilson |
|
Amiele becomes the first female student at Trinity College and goes on to disprove the Riemann Hypothesis at the age of 26, but is denied the Fields Medal. Written as if it were her life story recorded... (more) |
|
|
The Italian in Need of an Heir (2020) |
|
| Lynne Graham |
|
Maya is a beautiful British "maths whizz" who, if she had her way, would be working in an academic job doing research. She also is usually unwilling to put up with men who boss her around. But, her... (more) |
|
|
It's My Turn (1980) |
|
| Claudia Weill (director) |
|
About a mathematician who writes a proof of the Snake Lemma at the
speed of
light. Her love interest was Michael Douglas, some sort of athlete.
One mathematician I know claims he wrote a paper just... (more) |
|
|
The Jester and the Mathematician (2000) |
|
| Alan R. Gordon |
|
A short historical fiction piece involving Leonardo of Pisa ("Fibonacci"). Interesting story which features Fibonacci talking briefly about his rabbit-series/sequence, his abacus-duel with Pisa's foremost... (more) |
|
|
Journey into a Dark Heart (1998) |
|
| Peter Hoeg |
|
This story appears in the collection Tales of the Night made up of stories by Hoeg that are all set on the evening of March 19, 1929. In this one, a depressed young Danish mathematician takes a train... (more) |
|
|
Jumpers (1972) |
|
| Tom Stoppard |
|
In a philosophical monologue on the nature of morality, a main character considers Zeno's paradox and infinitesimals and imagines a circle as a limit of polygons. (more) |
|
|
Der kalte Himmel (2011) |
|
| Johannes Fabrick (director)
/ Andrea Stoll (writer) |
|
In this German film, a woman raising her children on a farm in 1967 tries to get help for her mathematically talented but anti-social son. Obtaining the services of a forward-thinking Berlin psychiatrist,... (more) |
|
|
Kapitoil (2010) |
|
| Teddy Wayne |
|
It is 1999 and Karim Issar is a Qatari programmer who has just moved to NYC to work on Wall Street. Karim understands the world through mathematics and equations, and wishes others did as well. He does... (more) |
|
|
Kavanagh (1849) |
|
| Henry Wadsworth Longfellow |
|
In the fourth chapter of this novel by the famous poet, the school teacher of the title tries to convince his skeptical wife that mathematics can be poetic by reading to her from Lilavati.
(This one chapter was published separately as Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, 3 (1855), pages 257—62, and so I will consider it both as a short story and as an excerpt from a novel.) (more) |
|
|
Kavita Through Glass (2002) |
|
| Emily Ishem Raboteau |
|
A loosely practicing Muslim graduate student in mathematics
has great difficulty understanding his Hindu wife. He tries
to understand her, love, and life in general via mathematics,
regarding which... (more) |
|
|
Kepler: A Novel (1981) |
|
| John Banville |
|
Johannes Kepler, the most famous Rennaissance court mathematician,
is remembered today for his successes, especially his explicit
description of planetary orbits. However, he also had some rather
strange... (more) |
|
|
A Killer Theorem (2007) |
|
| Colin Adams |
|
Mangum, P.I. returns in this mystery in which the unproven Gauss' Last Lemma is wielded as a murder weapon. Apparently, a certain approach to proving it is so enticing that merely showing it to mathematicians... (more) |
|
|
The Killion (1982) |
|
| Ian Frazier |
|
Fans of Monty Python will recall the joke so funny that anyone who reads it dies laughing. Frazier brings us the mathematical analogue: a number so big that it kills anyone who tries to think about it.... (more) |
|
|
Kim Possible (Episode: Mathter and Fervent) (2007) |
|
| Jim Peronto (script) |
|
This episode of the Disney animated TV series "Kim Possible" is a comic book parody featuring a mathematical villain.
As an English assignment, Kim Possible and Ron Stoppable have to write a paper... (more) |
|
|
The Kiss Quotient (2018) |
|
| Helen Hoang |
|
Stella is an woman with autistic tendencies who falls in love with the gigolo she hires to help her overcome her problems with intimacy. This romance novel, we are told, was inspired by the true life... (more) |
|
|
Klein Bottle (1978) |
|
| Cho-Se Hui |
|
This is another short Korean tale, where the author has again tried to give a parallel between a situation in real life and a geometrical object, this time the Klein bottle (also see the author’s “The... (more) |
|
|
Krise [Crisis] (1978) |
|
| Helga Königsdorf |
|
A pure mathematician at an East German research facility has already moved (not entirely by choice) to a technical institute when his paper on a crisis ["Krise"] in number theory is published. So, the... (more) |
|
|
Küplerin Savasi (2021) |
|
| Ahmet Baki Yerli |
|
This Turkish novel for young adults appears to be a fictionalized account of the dispute between Tartaglia and Cardano over the solution to cubic equations. A nice account of the true story can be found here in Quanta Magazine, but I'm afraid I do not know anything more about Yerli's book which so far has only been published in Turkish. (more) |
|
|
|
|
La fiamma sul ghiaccio (The Flame on the Ice) (2006) |
|
| Umberto Marino (director) |
|
An Italian movie about a mathematician with Asperger's syndrome.
The role of the protagonist is played by
Raoul Bova. According to Bova, It's the story of a young mathematics
professor afflicted with... (more) |
|
|
La formula di Ramanujan (2001) |
|
| Marco Abate (writer) / P. Ongaro (artist) |
|
A trip from Berkeley to India via Oxford to recover the lost Ramanujan's notebooks, pursued independently
by two (again, realistic) mathematicians, both driven by revenge, though of different kind.
Along... (more) |
|
|
Ladies' Night (2017) |
|
| Robert Dawson |
|
A card sharp known as "Lady Jane" attempts to swindle a statistician visiting Las Vegas for a conference. The plot twists and turns as it mentions things like the Monty Hall Problem, Game Theory, and... (more) |
|
|
Lady Claire is All That (2016) |
|
| Maya Rodale |
|
Claire Cavendish is a rare item in 19th century England, a woman whose primary interests lie within mathematics. Rather than making her an object of desire, however, her insistence on talking about maths... (more) |
|
|
The Lady's Code (2006) |
|
| Samantha Saxon |
|
The third in a series of romance novels about intelligent, confident women, The Lady's Code features Lady Juliet Pervell, who has ruined her reputation in social circles but earned an honorary degree in... (more) |
|
|
The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics (2019) |
|
| Olivia Waite |
|
Lucy Muchelny is responsible for the mathematical aspects of her father's famous publications in astronomy, but as this is the 19th century she receives no credit for that contribution. Desperate for... (more) |
|
|
Lambada (1990) |
|
| Joel Silbert (Director and Writer) / Sheldon Renan (Screenplay) |
|
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... (more) |
|
|
The Last Casino (2004) |
|
| Pierre Gill (director) /Steven Westren (screenplay) |
|
A fairly amateurish movie about a Math professor who is an expert card-counter and ipso facto, banned from most casinos. So he trains 3 math graduates to count cards and work as a team to fleece casinos... (more) |
|
|
The Last Enemy (2008) |
|
| Peter Berry (Screenplay) / Iain B. MacDonald (Director) |
|
In this BBC TV series, mathematician Stephen Ezard (Benedict Cumberbatch) returns home from China for his brother's funeral but finds himself caught up in two simultaneous stories of high level espionage.... (more) |
|
|
The Last Equation of Isaac Severy (2018) |
|
| Nova Jacobs |
|
After mathematician Isaac Severy's suspicious death, his grand-daughter follows the clues he left her to find and protect his final discovery.
In this murder mystery/family drama, Hazel Severy leaves... (more) |
|
|
The Last Theorem (2008) |
|
| Buzz Mauro |
|
A depressed music professor ponders Fermat's Last Theorem and the implications of its proof by Andrew Wiles.
Like many of Mauro's other stories, this one is very well written, focusing not so much on... (more) |
|
|
Law and Order: Criminal Intent (Episode: Inert Dwarf) (2004) |
|
| Renee Balcer (story) / Warren Leight (script) / Alex Chapple (director) |
|
The collaborator of a world-famous, wheelchair bound mathematical physicist is murdered. When the detectives investigate, suspicion falls on the mathematician's wife/nurse who appears to be abusing him.
Like... (more) |
|
|
Le larmes de saint Laurent (Wonder) (2010) |
|
| Dominique Fortier |
|
The three separate stories that comprise this book are tied together by common themes of romance, death and volcanism. It is because of the second story, entitled "Harmony of the Spheres", that I am including... (more) |
|
|
Le théorème de Travolta (2002) |
|
| Olivier Courcelle |
|
The adventures of a young mathematician
trapped in the curious and delirious world of a
mathematical congress. A cross between
David Lodge and Groucho Marx.
I believe it has not been translated
into english (but should)
Very funny description of the mathematical world. Excellently written. Delirious.
(more) |
|
|
|
|
Leaning Towards Infinity (1996) |
|
| Sue Woolfe |
|
Tells the story of an Australian woman who wins a contest for the best
mathematical theory from an amateur mathematician. The prize is a trip to
a math conference in Athens. The theory proposed by... (more) |
|
|
Leap (2004) |
|
| Lauren Gunderson |
|
This play explores the inspiration for Isaac Newton's amazing discoveries in 1664, personifying it in the form of two young girls whose playful interaction leads to the results we remember Newton for today.... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Leeches (2011) |
|
| David Albahari |
|
Serb author David Albahari's avant-garde novel about a newspaper columnist caught up in a Kabbalistic plot is notable in that it is written as a single, unbroken paragraph. It is also sort of interesting,... (more) |
|
|
Legacy of Light (2009) |
|
| Karen Zacarías |
|
Two tales of discovery and pregnancy are told in this play. An astrophysicist at the Newton Institute whose team has discovered evidence of a planet in formation feels that she is too old to be pregnant... (more) |
|
|
The Legend of Howard Thrush (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
I always have enjoyed the American folk tale, a medium in which one pretends to be speaking earnestly and in all sincerity about a history so ridiculous that it it simply cannot be taken seriously. There... (more) |
|
|
Lemma 1 (1978) |
|
| Helga Königsdorf |
|
This short story by an East German author concerns a mathematics graduate student who realizes right before her thesis defense that Lemma 1 (the initial small step on which the rest of her results depend)... (more) |
|
|
Il Lemma di Levemberg (1996) |
|
| Marco Abate (writer) / S. Natali (artist) |
|
Published in an Italian comic book, this story (whose title translates as "Levemberg's Lemma") was written by Abate and illustrated by Natali. The author describes it for us as follows:
A (possibly... (more) |
|
|
Lepel (2005) |
|
| Willem van de Sande Bakhuyzen (director)/Mieke de Jong (screenplay) |
|
In this charming family film from the Netherlands, a boy who believes his name is "Lepel" runs away from the mean button thief who has watched over him since his parents disappeared.
If you have come... (more) |
|
|
Let Newton Be! (2011) |
|
| Craig Baxter |
|
The three actors in this play portray Isaac Newton at three different stages of his life, as well as occasionally representing other people. Interestingly, the three Newton's interact with each other,... (more) |
|
|
Let's Play With Numbers [Suuji de Asobo] (2018) |
|
| Murako Kinuta |
|
The story follows Tateki Yokobe, a freshman in the math department of Yoshida University. Though formerly a top student, Yokobe quickly realises his eidetic memory is of no use in understanding highly... (more) |
|
|
Letters From Incompleteness (2021) |
|
| Jonah Howell |
|
This creative work of fiction takes the form of love letters from an unidentified narrator who has become obsessed with Kurt Gödel and his incompleteness theorems.
Some of the discussion of Gödel's... (more) |
|
|
Letters to a Young Mathematician (2006) |
|
| Ian Stewart |
|
I listed this one here before I had a chance to read it and am now wondering whether it should be counted as fiction at all. This is an excellent book which provides a lot of useful information about... (more) |
|
|
Lewis (Episode: Reputation) (2006) |
|
| Russell Lewis (Story) / Stephen Churchett (Screenplay) |
|
In this pilot episode of the spin-off from the popular Inspector Lewis television series, a female math student is murdered while she participates in a sleep study. Perfect numbers show up in the form... (more) |
|
|
The Library Paradox (2006) |
|
| Catherine Shaw |
|
Vanessa Duncan returns as the skilled amateur detective of Victorian England in this third mystery novel by "Catherine Shaw". (See The Three-Body Problem and Flowers Stained with Moonlight for the earlier... (more) |
|
|
Life After Genius (2008) |
|
| M. Ann Jacoby |
|
Although his family would normally expect him to stay in their small town and take over the family business (a combination of a furniture store and funeral home), Mead Fegley's "genius" gives him the unprecedented... (more) |
|
|
Life and Fate (1959) |
|
| Vasily Grossman |
|
A Russian nuclear physicist flirts with the wife of his mathematician colleague and makes an important mathematical discovery, all during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
I had not heard of this... (more) |
|
|
Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,
The Gentleman (1759) |
|
| Laurence Sterne |
|
Michele Benzi wrote to recommend that I add this classic novel, which was critically praised when it first appeared and then fell in esteem due to accusations of plagiarism. Benzi writes:
I was surprised... (more) |
|
|
Life in a Mirror (2003) |
|
| Daniel Ryan |
|
This e-book not only contains many explicit references to mathematics, but it also claims to follow the outline of a mathematical text!
Set in 18th century Brittany, the story is ostensibly about royalty... (more) |
|
|
Life of Pi (2001) |
|
| Yann Martel |
|
I read this novel when it first came out both because it (deservedly) received a lot of praise and awards, and also because the title suggested there might be some connection to math. When I realized... (more) |
|
|
The Limit (2019) |
|
| Freya Smith / Jack Williams |
|
This pop-rock musical about the life of mathematician Sophie Germain was performed in March 2019 at the VAULT festival in London.
The playwrights were supposedly looking for a historical female character... (more) |
|
|
The Limit of Delta Y Over Delta X (1994) |
|
| Richard Cumyn |
|
Here is a calculus example from a book with a title that can not
be more mathematical. I printed this one in a calculus book that I
wrote for my business/economics calculus class. I also read it out... (more) |
|
|
A Little Mathematician - Katie (2002) |
|
| Tadashi Miura |
|
A sweet little book by an author who wanted to be a math teacher and hopes he can "introduce the joy of learning mathematics to every student in this world through this story".
A little girl named Katie... (more) |
|
|
The Locked House of Pythagoras [P. no Misshitsu] (1999) |
|
| Soji Shimada |
|
A locked-room mystery which I found disorienting, needlessly complex and a bit incomprehensible, with very stilted writing, a know-it-all kid detective who has a magical god’s eye-view of everything,... (more) |
|
|
Logicomix (2008) |
|
| Apostolos Doxiadis / Christos Papadimitriou |
|
A graphic novel on the history of mathematical logic by the authors of Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture and Turing. In an interview (available online here) Papadimitriou says:
It is really... (more) |
|
|
The Long Chalkboard (2006) |
|
| Jenny Allen / Jules Feiffer (Illustrator) |
|
Allen's book is a collection of three short-short stories spread
out over book length with illustrations on every page, in the usual
style of children's literature, complete with charmingly simple... (more) |
|
|
Long Division (2003) |
|
| Michael Redhill |
|
The title of this short story refers both to arithmetic, a beloved subject of the school age child at its center, and the separation that his mother feels from him and his father due to the child's extraordinary... (more) |
|
|
Long Division (2010) |
|
| Buzz Mauro |
|
A very short story in which a hypochondriacal boy confuses the long division which he is learning in school with the cell division in the cancer that killed his grandmother. The boy's mother responds... (more) |
|
|
Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land (2005) |
|
| John Crowley |
|
This book is made up of notes and e-mail messages from a feminist historian interspersed with chapters from a previously unknown novel by Lord Byron which she has discovered while researching his daughter,... (more) |
|
|
|
|
The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2008) |
|
| Zachary Mason |
|
The introduction to this novel is a work of pseudo-scholarship, explaining how the chapters to follow were decoded by an NSA cryptographer with the help of the author. The intro contains references to... (more) |
|
|
Lost Empire (A Sam and Remi Fargo Adventure) (2011) |
|
| Clive Cussler / Grant Blackwood |
|
When archaeological adventuring couple Remi and Sam Fargo come across an old ship's bell off the coast of Zanzibar, they discover that someone else doesn't want them to find it. Eventually, their discovery... (more) |
|
|
Lost in the Funhouse (1968) |
|
| John Barth |
|
According to the "foreward to the Anchor Books Edition", this
collection of short stories is "strung together on a few echoed and developed themes and [circles] back upon itself; not to close a simple... (more) |
|
|
Love Counts (2005) |
|
| Michael Hastings (libretto) / Michael Nyman (score) |
|
This opera tells the tale of the surprising friendship between a boxer whose career and life are in decline and a mathematics professor who uses arithmetic as a tool to help him out. It premiered in March 2005 at Germany's Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe.
Thanks to Peter Freyd for pointing it out to me. (more) |
|
|
The Love Formula (2023) |
|
| Giulia Clerici/Giulia Pasqualini |
|
this Italian graphic novel contains three different tales of romance. Each one is written to resemble a different geometric relationship between lines and curves: being parallel, being asymptotic, and... (more) |
|
|
Lucy and David and the God Equation (2011) |
|
| Alan McKenzie |
|
Lucy, a freshman at a Scottish University, and David, the graduate student who leads the problem sessions for her physics class, discuss the mathematical and philosophical implications of Gödel's First... (more) |
|
|
Løvekvinnen [Lion Woman] (2006) |
|
| Erik Fosnes Hansen |
|
This Norwegian novel follows the life of a young girl who has a hairy face due to hypertrichosis.
According to Tom Louis Lindstrøm (who kindly brought this work of mathematical fiction to my attention)... (more) |
|
|
The Mad Mathematician (from ITV's Junior Maths) (1984) |
|
| ITV Schools |
|
Each episode of Junior Maths, a British children's TV program that was part of ITV Schools, featured a story about "The Mad Mathematician". For example, in this episode (currently available on YouTube),... (more) |
|
|
A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (2006) |
|
| Janna Levin
|
|
This novel about Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel contains much that has already been said many times before, and occasionally "tries too hard" artistically. Still I very much enjoyed reading it, and even... (more) |
|
|
The Madness of Crowds (2021) |
|
| Louise Penny |
|
In Penny's 17th murder mystery featuring detective Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of Sûreté du Québec, a statistician with a controversial political philosophy speaks at the local university, resulting... (more) |
|
|
Magic Squares (1977) |
|
| Paul Calter |
|
A very unconventionally written mystery story full of well placed and well-integrated problems in mathematics, which makes this a great book to be included in a course on ‘mathematics in literature'.... (more) |
|
|
Magpie Lane (2020) |
|
| Lucy Atkins |
|
This wonderful novel is difficult to describe, somewhere between literary fiction and a procedural mystery with the atmosphere of a supernatural thriller. The book is narrated by Dee, a nanny who is being... (more) |
|
|
Maid of Murder (2010) |
|
| Amanda Flower |
|
Like the author of this murder mystery, protagonist India Hayes is a librarian at a small midwestern college. Presumably unlike the author, Hayes must prove the innocence of her mathematician brother... (more) |
|
|
Mailman (2000) |
|
| J. Robert Lennon |
|
The title character, called Mailman, is a mentally ill mailman
with criminal and deviant behavior with respect to the mail that
he handles. It turns out that Mailman had once been a mathematics
graduate... (more) |
|
|
The Man of Forty Crowns (1768) |
|
| François Marie Arouet de Voltaire |
|
This classic, mordant commentary on the prevailing economic system in France in mid 18th century showcases a very long dialogue of 20+ pages between the narrator and a “geometrician”, taken to mean... (more) |
|
|
|
|
The Man Who Dammed the Yangtze: A Mathematical Novel (2011) |
|
| Alex Kuo |
|
A story of two number theorists at the opposite ends of the world having similar experiences of strife and disillusionment at times of great turmoil. Ge is a female mathematician teaching in schools in... (more) |
|
|
The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015) |
|
| Matt Brown (Screenwriter and Director) |
|
This biographical film starring Dev Patel as Ramanujan and Jeremy Irons as Hardy is based on the biography of the same name by Robert Kaniglel. Because it is a rather reliable adaptation of that non-fictional... (more) |
|
|
|
|
The Manga Guide to Calculus (2009) |
|
| Hiroyuki Kojima |
|
This book attempts to teach calculus concepts and convey their importance to everyday life through the fictional story of a rookie newspaper reporter. She does not initially expect math to be an important... (more) |
|
|
The Manga Guide to Linear Algebra (2008) |
|
| Shin Takahashi / Iroha Inoue |
|
Reiji wants to learn karate and he is in love with a girl named Misa. So, it works out perfectly when it turns out that her big brother who is the captain of the karate club agrees to let Reiji into the... (more) |
|
|
The Manga Guide to Regression Analysis (2005) |
|
| Shin Takahashi / Iroha Inoue |
|
Like other books in the "Learn with Manga" series, this one uses romance and manga styling to teach an advanced mathematical subject. Moreover, as in The Manga Guide to Statistics, the main character... (more) |
|
|
The Manga Guide to Statistics (2004) |
|
| Shin Takahashi |
|
Rui wants to learn statistics not because she is interested in the subject but because she has a crush on Mr. Igarashi, whom she hopes her father will hire as her tutor. When instead her father hires... (more) |
|
|
Mangum, P.I. (2004) |
|
| Colin Adams |
|
A parody of the hard-boiled private detective genre in which ``P.I.'' stands for ``Principal Investigator'', a phrase familiar to anyone who has applied for a research grant. In this hilarious story,... (more) |
|
|
The MANIAC (2023) |
|
| Benjamin Labatut |
|
The life of John von Neumann is the main focus of this book which (like the author's other work in this database) could easily be mistaken for a non-fictional history book. The middle portion of the book... (more) |
|
|
Many Moons (1943) |
|
| James Thurber |
|
In this famous children's tale about a princess who wants the moon, "the
mathematician" is one of three wisemen who shows himself not to be so
wise. (The jester, on the other hand,...)
It was... (more) |
|
|
A Map for the Missing (2022) |
|
| Belinda Huijuan Tang |
|
Tang Yitian, a Chinese-American math professor who grew up in China shortly after the revolution, undertakes a journey to find his estranged father.
Anti-intellectualism always made it hard for Yitian... (more) |
|
|
Margin Call (2011) |
|
| J.C. Chandor (Writer and Director) |
|
The star-studded cast in this film portray the employees of an investment bank at the outset of the 2008 mortgage induced financial crisis.
I did not initially include it in this database because I thought... (more) |
|
|
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017) |
|
| Amy Sherman-Palladino / Daniel Palladino |
|
The main plot of this show -- which concerns the transformation of Midge Maisel from a Jewish housewife in the 1950s into a successful and edgy standup comic -- has nothing to do with mathematics. So,... (more) |
|
|
The Mask of Zeus (1992) |
|
| Desmond Cory |
|
Math is discussed a lot in this "Professor Dobie Mystery" novel because both the `detective' (Dobie) and the victim (his former Ph.D. student) are mathematicians. Of course, the math doesn't have much... (more) |
|
|
El matemático del Rey (2002) |
|
| Juan Carlos Arce |
|
It is a novel about a period in the lives of Juan Lezuza and his friend Luis Obelar during the first years of the rule of Phillip IV of Spain. Juan Lezuza is appointed teacher of the King, but it is... (more) |
|
|
The Math Code (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
A friend of mine once told me that he believes that mathematicians invented intentionally confusing notations to keep others from understanding what they were saying. I'm sure this is not true. We mathematicians... (more) |
|
|
Math Curse (1995) |
|
| Jon Scieszka / Lane Smith (illustrator) |
|
In this children's picture book, the main character finds that "anything can be a math problem" when her elementary school teacher puts a math curse on her. For example:
Unfortunately for me, LUNCH... (more) |
|
|
Math Girls (2007) |
|
| Hiroshi Yuki |
|
Three high school friends work through some difficult mathematical ideas in this book, recently translated into English from the Japanese original.
The author is apparently well known in Japan for his... (more) |
|
|
Math is Murder (2012) |
|
| Robert C. Brigham / James B. Reed |
|
This is a murder mystery co-written by an emeritus math professor and a retired crime scene investigator. The victim was an egotistical and (almost unbelievably) unpleasant mathematics department chair... (more) |
|
|
The Math Olympian (2015) |
|
| Richard Hoshino |
|
A novel about a girl hoping to be on the Canadian team to the International Mathematical Olypmiad written by someone who should know what it is like. (FYI The author earned a silver medal as part of the... (more) |
|
|
Math Patrol (1977) |
|
| TV Ontario |
|
"Math Patrol was a 15-minute long educational TV series produced in the late 1970s by TV Ontario about the adventures of a secret agent named "Sydney" who dressed up as a kangaroo with a blue trenchcoat.... (more) |
|
|
Mathe-Matti (2022) |
|
| Anuradha Mahasinghe |
|
A collection of mathematical fiction short stories published in the country of Sri Lanka by Sayura Books. Unfortunately, I do not read Sinhalese and so have not been able to enjoy it myself, but the author... (more) |
|
|
Mathematical Doom (1936) |
|
| Paul Ernst |
|
A detective, one Mr. Pearson, catches the crooks using a little geometry. As the story tagline says,
“Crooks try to subtract a copper from life - and find he had added up a Mathematical Doom for... (more) |
|
|
Mathematical Goodbye (1999) |
|
| Hiroshi Mori |
|
Mori is a popular author of mystery novels in Japan and a former professor of engineering at Nagoya University. Li-Chang Hung, who has read the books translated into Chinese, has suggested that I add... (more) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Mathematical R & D (1979) |
|
| Paul J. Nahin |
|
This short short story, published in the professional journal
IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems describes a
talk by the (fictional) famous mathematician Professor Osgood. Greatly
limited... (more) |
|
|
Mathematically Bent (2000) |
|
| Colin Adams |
|
Geometer and knot-theorist Colin Adams (Williams College, MA) has been writing this short, mathematically-wise and bitingly funny column in the quarterly issues of The Mathematical Intelligencer since... (more) |
|
|
The Mathematician (1997) |
|
| George Weinberg |
|
“Peter K was the first person on earth ever to invert a skew symmetric matrix by pressing a button”. So begins the story, set in the years where computers had just started making a foray... (more) |
|
|
The Mathematician (1967) |
|
| Will Manson |
|
Despite the title, there is almost no math in this pulpy spy story. Its Cold War nationalism and sexism date it somewhat, but it is fine as light entertainment, with danger, romance, and a "twist ending".
The... (more) |
|
|
Mathematician Proof (1920) |
|
| Ralph Ellison de Castro |
|
An utterly trite story about a genius of a mathematician (aren't they all? To wit, “he had the binomial theorem for breakfast, lunched on integral calculus and for his evening meal considered attempts... (more) |
|
|
The Mathematician Repents (2004) |
|
| Estep Nagy |
|
A short story (?) in which Paul Erdős wakes up in the home of a Parisian mathematician, seems a bit confused, wanders around, and says some strange things. No real math is discussed in the story,... (more) |
|
|
A Mathematician's Love Story (1901) |
|
| James Richmond Aitken |
|
A very sensitive story of lifelong love full of silent heartache for a man whose mind was filled for the most part by mathematics and relentless questions about calculations of laws governing daily physical... (more) |
|
|
The Mathematician's Shiva (2014) |
|
| Stuart Rojstaczer |
|
When Rachela Karnokovich dies, her family's attempt to conduct the Jewish mourning ritual of sitting shiva is disturbed by the many strangers who descend on her Madison, WI home. Although she never won... (more) |
|
|
The Mathematicians of Grizzly Drive (1988) |
|
| Josef Skvorecky |
|
A detective story, in the "hard boiled" genre, featuring Eve Adam, a sexy nightclub performer who solves crimes in her free time. In this story, she visits a house where mathematicians gather to entertain... (more) |
|
|
The Mathematics of Being Human (2015) |
|
| Michelle Osherow / Manil Suri |
|
A math professor and a literature professor attempt to collaborate on an interdisciplinary course in this semi-autobiographical one act play.
To begin with, I should admit that nearly everything I know... (more) |
|
|
The Mathematics of Friedrich Gauss (2012) |
|
| D.W. Wilson |
|
A math teacher compares his life with that of the great German mathematician C.F. Gauss as he ponders his own marital difficulties.
This short story appears in the anthology "Once You Break a Knuckle" which was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas prize.
(more) |
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|
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The Mathematics of Nina Gluckstein (1985) |
|
| Esther Vilar |
|
When Argentina's most famous singer dies in an accident during a concert, his unpopular wife, Nina Gluckstein, commits suicide. Yet, since public opinion of her was so low (and perhaps because she was... (more) |
|
|
Mathematics of the Heart (2011) |
|
| Kefi Chadwick (playwright) / Donnacadh O'Briain (director) |
|
An expert on the mathematics of chaos theory deals with chaos in his own life in the form of a girlfriend seeking commitment, a brother crashing in his apartment, and a new graduate student.
I have not seen this play, but have only run across notices announcing its production at the Brighton Fringe festival in 2011. Additional information about the play would be most appreciated. (more) |
|
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Mathmakers (1978) |
|
| TV Ontario |
|
Canadian television show (circa 1978) about making a television show.
Humorous story lines illustrate mathematical concepts.
"The program was developed and produced by TVOntario in 1978. Each
episode... (more) |
|
|
MathNet (1987) |
|
| Childrens Television Workshop |
|
A children's TV show in which mysteries are solved using
mathematics. The suspects and victims always ask the investigators
"Are you the police?" To which they reply "No, we're
mathematicians!"... (more) |
|
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Maths a mort (1990) |
|
| Margot Bruyère |
|
This murder mystery which takes place at the IHES in Paris was originally entitled "Dis-moi qui tu aimes (je te dirai
qui tu hais)". However, it has just been
be republished (Fall of 2002) with a change... (more) |
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Maths on a Plane (2008) |
|
| P T |
|
This story, about a student flirting with the attractive woman in the seat next to him on a plane, won the student category of the 2008 New Writers Award from Cambridge University's ``Plus+ Magazine''.... (more) |
|
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Mattemorden (2015) |
|
| Alexander Barth/Gustav Öhman Spjuth |
|
In this Swedish TV series, a police officer with dyscalculia and a "professor" who can only do math when he is drunk are working together to solve a murder in which the only clue is a math problem. Unfortunately,... (more) |
|
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A Matter of Geometry (1915) |
|
| Ared White |
|
Pythagoras Theorem (or some algebraic operations like square-roots or mental arithmetic) is a device used sometimes to stand in for mathematical erudition, intellectual thinking and the like. In “A... (more) |
|
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Maxwell's Equations (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
James Clerk Maxwell was the 19th century theoretician who discovered electro-magnetic waves. He is often described as a "physicist", but I would argue that he was a mathematician. Certainly some of his... (more) |
|
|
Mean Girls (2004) |
|
| Tina Fey (screenplay) /Mark S. Waters (director) |
|
In this movie about teenage girls -- written by Tina Fey (Saturday Night Live, 30 Rock) and inspired by the non-fiction book Queen Bees and Wannabes -- a previously home schooled student (played by Lindsay... (more) |
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The Measure of Eternity (2006) |
|
| Sean McMullen |
|
The beautiful servant of an even more beautiful courtesan leaves the palace in an ancient city and finds a beggar proudly shouting "I have nothing" in many different languages. Yet, this beggar seems... (more) |
|
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Measuring the World (2006) |
|
| Daniel Kehlmann |
|
Two famous Germans of the 19th Century, mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and explorer/geologist Alexander von Humboldt, are irreverently presented in this novel which topped the sales charts in Germany... (more) |
|
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Mefisto: A Novel (1986) |
|
| John Banville |
|
Although the mathematics is only discussed in this novel in the vaguest terms, it is of the greatest importance to the book. Gabriel Swan, the main character/narrator is so focused on numbers and equations... (more) |
|
|
The Mentalist (Episode: 18-5-4) (2010) |
|
| Bruno Heller (writer) / Leonard Dick (writer) / Charles Beeson (director) |
|
In this episode of the series about agents from the California Bureau of Investigation, an unemployed mathematician is murdered by someone wearing a clown suit.
The victim, Noah Valiquette, was a... (more) |
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|
Mercury Rising (1998) |
|
| Harold Becker (director) |
|
Bruce Willis is an FBI agent trying to protect an autistic child whose mathematical abilities allow him to break the government's top secret codes.
Now, it is true that some of the most frequently used... (more) |
|
|
Midnight Diner (Episode: Omelette Rice) (2016) |
|
| Joji Matsuoka (Director)
/ Marina Oshima (Screenplay) |
|
Each episode of this Japanese TV series follows the stories of some patrons of a Tokyo diner that is only open from midnight to 7AM. "Omelette Rice" is a love story between two regulars who meet there... (more) |
|
|
Midtown Pythagoras (2007) |
|
| Michael Brodsky |
|
Michael Brodsky is a deconstructionist's dream writer, which for most people,
simply means utterly unreadable. His many novels, stories, and plays inhabit a
world where meaning is just past the reader's... (more) |
|
|
The Mind-Body Problem (1983) |
|
| Rebecca Goldstein |
|
A philosophy graduate student seduces and marries a famous mathematician. They do not have a great marriage, but we are presented with some thought provoking passages concerning Princeton University,... (more) |
|
|
The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996) |
|
| Barbra Streisand (director) / Richard LaGravenese (Writer) |
|
Love story with Jeff Bridges and Barbra Streisand as math and English
professors (respectively) at Columbia University in which they try (unsuccessfully) to achieve a marriage of deep companionship but... (more) |
|
|
Miscalculations (2000) |
|
| Elizabeth Mansfield |
|
This romance novel features female "math whiz",
hired to help an attractive millionaire handle his wealth. Of course, they fall in love.
If you have read this book and can correct/add to the description above,
please write to me at kasmana@cofc.edu.
(more) |
|
|
The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl (2018) |
|
| Stacy McAnulty |
|
A girl who developed "genius level" mathematical abilities after being struck by lightning has a thing or two to learn about life in this novel for young adults.
Lucy Callahan finds that after her... (more) |
|
|
Miss Havilland (2020) |
|
| Gay Daly |
|
Evelyn Havilland, who left her studies in mathematics at Stanford University in 1917 to aid with the war effort, must decide between marrying a linguistics professor she met when they were both working... (more) |
|
|
Mister God, This is Anna (1985) |
|
| Fynn |
|
Though it is presented as if it were non-fiction, it is generally believed that this account concerning a very thoughtful six year old girl is a work of fiction. It is primarily about the girl's philosophy... (more) |
|
|
Mobius Strip (1978) |
|
| Cho-Se Hui |
|
A very short Korean tale, where the author has tried to give a parallel between a situation in real life and the Möbius strip. The story begins with a Math professor's lecture, where he explains the... (more) |
|
|
Moby Dick (1851) |
|
| Herman Melville |
|
I honestly had no idea that there was anything mathematical about this classic novel until Allan Goldberg suggested I look at Sara Hart's article on the subject in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.
Of... (more) |
|
|
Moment of Madness (2002) |
|
| Una-Mary Parker |
|
When her father, a brilliant but somewhat twisted mathematical statistician, dies unexpectedly, a woman is forced by his will to distribute valuable jewels to all of the women with whom he has cheated... (more) |
|
|
The Monkey in Hilbert's Hotel (2019) |
|
| K. B. Basant |
|
This is yet another tale about a hotel to illustrate the mind-blowing properties of infinite cardinals. Like the others, which you can find listed below among the "similar works", this is only barely... (more) |
|
|
The Monty Hall Problem (2021) |
|
| Rebekah Bergman |
|
The narrator compares situations in dating life with the choices presented in classic puzzle games like the Monty Hall Problem. She is currently in a relationship with a man with 3 dogs who loves cereal,... (more) |
|
|
Morte di un matematico napoletano (1992) |
|
| Mario Martone (director) |
|
"This movie describes the last day in [the] life of a
famous Italian mathematician: Renato Caccioppoli. He was a fascinating and
discussed person in Naples' political and cultural life. [A] member... (more) |
|
|
Mozart and the Whale (2005) |
|
| Petter Næss (Director) |
|
A romance about two people with Asperger's Syndrome based on a true story. I have not seen the film, but understand that the male character is obsessed with numbers and statistics but works as a cab driver.... (more) |
|
|
Mr. Churchill's Secretary (2012) |
|
| Susan Elia MacNeal |
|
After graduating with a degree in mathematics from Wellesley, Maggie Hope plans to go on to graduate studies at MIT, but her plans change unexpectedly when a letter from England gets her instead looking... (more) |
|
|
Mrs. Einstein (1998) |
|
| Anna McGrail |
|
It's a wonderful novel that invents a history for Einstein's illegitimate daughter, about whom little is known. In the novel, she's a mathematician who becomes obsessed with her father's refusal to acknowledge... (more) |
|
|
Mrs. Warren's Profession (1894) |
|
| George Bernard Shaw |
|
This is Shaw's notorious play about poverty and prostitution, the
"profession" of the title. (The play itself was not performed in
public in the UK until 1925.)
Mrs. Warren has made her fortune... (more) |
|
|
Mulligan Stew (1979) |
|
| Gilbert Sorrentino |
|
An avant garde novel, or a parody of one, presented in the form of a collection of letters, notes, papers and other writings. Includes Cardano's formula, plus a full length parody of a mathematics research... (more) |
|
|
Multi-Colored Dome (1987) |
|
| Martin Gardner |
|
A light-hearted, short story about a shy but precocious Math student working on symbolic logic (“he had read “Principia Mathematica” when he was in high school, and understood it,... (more) |
|
|
Murder and Mendelssohn (Phryne Fisher Mystery) (2014) |
|
| Kerry Greenwood |
|
As a fan of the Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries TV Series, I was pleased to see that the 20th novel in the series that inspired it features a mathematician, giving me an excuse to read it.
Phryne Fisher... (more) |
|
|
Murder at Queen's Landing (2021) |
|
| Andrea Penrose |
|
This is the fourth in a series of books in which romance sparks between Wrexford (a chemist) and Sloan (an artist) while they solve mysteries in Regency-era England. In this one, the mystery involves... (more) |
|
|
Murder at the Margin (1978) |
|
| Marshall Jevons |
|
This is the first of the Henry Spearman murder mysteries (the others
being THE FATAL EQUILIBRIUM and A DEADLY INDIFFERENCE--they can be read
in any order). These unusual murder mysteries star Harvard... (more) |
|
|
Murder by Mathematics (1948) |
|
| Hector Hawton |
|
The chair of the mathematics department at a British university and a shady bookseller are the victims in this "whodunnit"
published by Ward Lock & Co. (London and Melbourne) in 1948.
It was thanks... (more) |
|
|
Murder in the Great Church (2020) |
|
| Tefcros Michaelides |
|
Essentially all I know about this book is that it is a murder mystery which takes place in 6th century Constantinople and that the primary suspect is a young mathematician. Unfortunately, I do not read... (more) |
|
|
Murder on the Einstein Express (2016) |
|
| Harun Šiljak |
|
An essay containing many interesting remarks and anecdotes about mathematics and mathematical physics presented in the form of a dialogue between a professor and students. Topics covered include entropy,... (more) |
|
|
Murder, She Conjectured (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
A police psychologist attending a conference in Cambridge, England is pulled into an unsolved murder mystery by her mathematician boyfriend. An important theme of the story is the oppresive sexism that... (more) |
|
|
The Murdered Mathematician (1949) |
|
| Harry Stephen Keeler |
|
This book is probably the least believable thing I've ever read, but lots of fun!
Quiribus Brown is a 7 1/2 foot tall man who was raised by his father on a farm in Indiana. His father was a math professor... (more) |
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|
Murmur (2019) |
|
| Will Eaves |
|
A novel about a character whose story is clearly closely modeled on the life of Alan Turing. Like Turing, Alec Pryor is a British mathematician whose worldview is shaped by a childhood romance with a... (more) |
|
|
Musgrave Ritual (1893) |
|
| Sir Arthur Conan Doyle |
|
A tiny bit of mathematics is used by Sherlock Holmes
to solve this mystery. In it, he ties together the disappearance of a
housemaid, the discovery of the dead body of the chief butler and a strange
poem... (more) |
|
|
The Music of the Spheres (2001) |
|
| Elizabeth Redfern |
|
A highly praised (a la Caleb Carr) historical thriller set in Europe in
1795, involving lots of astronomy. This includes Laplace musing over his
theorem that gravitational perturbations are bounded, and his wondering
if a similar theorem applies to history.
(more) |
|
|
My Heart Belongs to Bertie (2018) |
|
| Helen DeWitt |
|
This short story, which appears in the anthology "Some Trick: Thirteen Stories by Helen DeWitt" features an academic turned author arguing with a literary agent who wants him to include less math in his... (more) |
|
|
The Mystery of Khufu's Tomb (1935) |
|
| Talbot Mundy |
|
A rapid-read, reasonably entertaining novel about the real location of the Pharaoh Khufu's (Cheops) tomb and the fabulous treasury buried therein. An old, Chinese mathematician spends decades decoding... (more) |
|
|
The Mystic Cipher (2009) |
|
| Dennis Mangrum |
|
When an ex-Army Ranger finds a mysterious coded document on his farm purporting to be the key to the location of a hidden treasure, he enlists the aid of his daughter, a math student. There is stereotypical... (more) |
|
|
The N-Plus-1th-Degree (1968) |
|
| Stephen Barr |
|
A mathematician is accused of murdering a man who flirted with his wife. Her faith in him (which is so strong, she describes it as being to the n-plus-1th degree) allows her to figure out how and by... (more) |
|
|
Nachman (1998) |
|
| Leonard Michaels |
|
An American mathematician attends a conference in Poland, the country in which his grandparents were killed in a Nazi concentration camp. This is during the Cold War, and the American consul warns him... (more) |
|
|
Nachman at the Races (1999) |
|
| Leonard Michaels |
|
In Michaels' third Nachman story, we learn that the UCLA mathematician enjoys attending horse races -- apparently his only emotional outlet besides his mathematics research. There is discussion of the... (more) |
|
|
Nachman Burning (1998) |
|
| Leonard Michaels |
|
In this story, the reclusive UCLA mathematician Nachman, a recurring character in stories by Leonard Michaels, gets a haircut. He chooses a barber he knows to be terrible at cutting hair, but he goes... (more) |
|
|
Nachman from Los Angeles (2002) |
|
| Leonard Michaels |
|
This second "Nachman" story by Leonard Michaels is a flashback to a time when the UCLA mathematician was a graduate student and hired by a rich Arabian prince to ghostwrite a philosophy paper for him.... (more) |
|
|
Nagel im Himmel (2020) |
|
| Patrick Hofmann |
|
The protagonist in this novel grows up in a loveless, dysfunctional family, but finds refuge and success in mathematics until he is "saved" by a physicist.
Since I do not read German, my knowledge of... (more) |
|
|
Naked Came the Post-modernist (2013) |
|
| Sarah Lawrence College Writing Class WRIT-3303-R / Melvin Jules Bukiet |
|
Written as a group project by the students in a creative writing class at Sarah Lawrence College, this wacky academic farce takes the form of a whodunit, trying to identify the murderer of a math professor. (more) |
|
|
The Name of the Rose (1980) |
|
| Umberto Eco |
|
A mystery novel which takes place in a 14th Century monastery by the brilliant Italian author, Umberto Eco. This book only has a small amount of math in it, but I frequently receive recommendations to... (more) |
|
|
Nearly Gone (2015) |
|
| Elle Cosimano |
|
Nearly Boswell has (obviously) a really cool name. She also has a strong interest in her science and math classes. And, for some reason, she also has the ability to taste emotions when she touches other... (more) |
|
|
The Needle in a Haystack (2002) |
|
| Tom DeMarco |
|
A pretty funny, silly story about a tailor with a mathematical bent who loses a needle in a haystack. Quite despondent about his chances of finding it, he decides to be mathematically rigorous in his... (more) |
|
|
The Nesting Dolls (2020) |
|
| Alina Adams |
|
A novel in three-parts focusing on three women in the same family over the course of a century. It is the middle story, concerning Natasha Crystal, that is most strongly connected to mathematics. Natasha... (more) |
|
|
Newton's Hooke (2004) |
|
| David Pinner |
|
A play about Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke which presents "the dark side" of Newton. Emphasis is put on his egotism (not only does he think that he is incomparably brilliant, but he also seems to think... (more) |
|
|
Night and Day (1919) |
|
| Virginia Woolf |
|
The protagonist, Katherine Hilbery,
is a young woman who (like the author) grows up in a "literary"
family; her "job" is to help her mother both in writing a biography of
her grandfather, a famous... (more) |
|
|
The Nine Tailors (1934) |
|
| Dorothy Leigh Sayers |
|
This Lord Peter Wimsey novel is often considered Sayers' best. The plot revolves around the art of change ringing, often called "campanology" by non-campanologists. As usual with Sayers, she makes... (more) |
|
|
No Chance (2001) |
|
| Guy Hasson |
|
While playing poker, a math professor and a biology professor discuss the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, with the mathematician offering what he sees as a mathematical argument proving... (more) |
|
|
No One You Know (2008) |
|
| Michelle Richmond |
|
Having felt overshadowed by her mathematician older sister when she was alive, the main character becomes obsessed with her murder after the sister is killed. Using her sister's notebook describing her... (more) |
|
|
No Regrets (2007) |
|
| Shannon Butcher |
|
This is an espionage thriller in which a cryptographer reluctantly helps the military break a mathematical code. It gets high ratings from those who enjoy this sort of cloak-and-dagger stuff. Moreover,... (more) |
|
|
Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less (1976) |
|
| Jeffrey Archer |
|
A mathematics professor who lectures at Oxford on group theory is among four clever people who plot to get revenge on the con artist who duped them in this, the first novel by politician and now best-selling... (more) |
|
|
Notes from the Underground (1864) |
|
| Fyodor Dostoevsky |
|
Part I
involves an unnamed rather crazed and unreliable narrator
(generally known as "the Underground Man") raving and rambling
against life, the universe, and everything. A few... (more) |
|
|
Nothing but the Truth (and a few white lies) (2006) |
|
| Justina Chen Headley |
|
This is a novel for young adults about a half Asian teenager who is sent to a summer Math Camp at Stanford by her overprotective mother. She enjoys the camp more than she expected to, until her mother... (more) |
|
|
NUMB3RS (2005) |
|
| Nick Falacci / Cheryl Heuton |
|
This TV crime drama (premiered January 2005) follows the adventures of a pair of brothers, one a mathematics professor and the other an FBI agent, as they combine forces to solve mysteries.
Cool effects... (more) |
|
|
Number 9: The Search for the Sigma Code (1998) |
|
| Cecil Balmond |
|
A young boy learns about mathematics while trying to solve a mathematical puzzle.
"As a teacher and Education Inspector in England I would rate
this book very highly. It is extremely well written... (more) |
|
|
The Number of Love (The Codebreakers) (2019) |
|
| Roseanna M. White |
|
This novel may fall into an unlikely combination of categories (it is a wartime religious historical romance spy story that is also mathematical), but its main character is a familiar stereotype: Margot... (more) |
|
|
Number Stories of Long Ago (1919) |
|
| David Eugene Smith |
|
A really beautiful, well-crafted book which presents a very wide variety of aspects of the history of number theory through fictional stories from Mesopotamia, Rome, Egypt, China, and many other places,... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Numbers (2009) |
|
| Dana Dane |
|
Hip Hop artist Dana Dane wrote this novel about a NYC youth with mathematical talent who gets caught up in a life of crime. There is no actual mathematics discussed. Rather, it appears in a few brief comments only to justify the protagonist's nickname of "Numbers" and presumably to convince us that he had the potential for a bright future under the right circumstances.
(more) |
|
|
Numbers in the Dark (La notte dei numeri) (1990) |
|
| Italo Calvino |
|
A boy looking around the huge office building where his mother works meets an old accountant who now works with computers but reveals to him an undiscovered arithmetic error made back in one of the company's... (more) |
|
|
Odd Squad (2014) |
|
| Tim McKeon/ Adam Peltzman |
|
A governmental organization run by children investigates "odd" phenomena and solves problems with some math and a lot of computer graphics in this live-action TV show from TVOKids and PBS Kids.
I'm... (more) |
|
|
The Odd Women (1893) |
|
| George Gissing |
|
This is one of many Victorian novels about romance, gender and class, but it has aged well. Among the several relationships it considers is one between a mathematician, the author of "A Treatise on Trilinear... (more) |
|
|
Odds Against Tomorrow (2013) |
|
| Nathaniel Rich |
|
Mitchell Zukor is a statistician and probabilist whose area of expertise is the prediction of disasters. To many people, including the reporter/narrator, this makes him a humorous and pathetic number... (more) |
|
|
Odile (1937) |
|
| Raymond Queneau |
|
A humorous semi-autobiographical novel by this famous, French, surrealistic author.
Queneau seems to have had some training as a mathematician and was friends
with several leading French mathematicians.... (more) |
|
|
Of Mystery There Is No End (2002) |
|
| Leonard Michaels |
|
Leonard Michaels' recurring character of UCLA mathematician Nachman faces questions of infidelity when he learns of the extra-marital affairs of his friend Norbert and Norbert's wife.
It is somewhat... (more) |
|
|
Off Day! (1953) |
|
| Al Feldstein (writer)/ Jack Kamen (artist) |
|
Believe it or not, this Weird Science story is essentially a lecture on the law of large numbers.
A very worried college professor tells his class he's just witnessed the failure of one of the most... (more) |
|
|
Oh, Brother (2007) |
|
| Stanley Hart |
|
A serious mystery/adventure novella from an author better known as a script writer for the old Carol Burnett show. A professor solicits the help of his brother, a retired police detective, in order to... (more) |
|
|
An Old Arithmetician (1885) |
|
| Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman |
|
The title character of this short story, which appeared in the September 1885 issue of Harper's Weekly, is an old, uneducated woman who loves computing (with chalk and slate):
You have always been very... (more) |
|
|
The Old Mathematician (from Maschalk Manor) (1848) |
|
| Anonymous |
|
A very charming, humorous description of the final days of an old man who retires to a small Dutch hamlet where no one knows him. While any arrival of a stranger in a tiny community is always a cause... (more) |
|
|
The Old Mathematician (1848) |
|
| Dinah Maria Muloch |
|
A very touching story full of pathos, quite reflective of the Victorian era ethos in the mid-nineteenth century. The writing is high-grade, though math content itself is non-existent, since the story... (more) |
|
|
On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction (2003) |
|
| Karl Iagnemma |
|
The title of the story was the title of a chapter in the Ph.D. thesis that Joseph, the main character, was working on...but never finished. Instead, he wound up living with his advisor's daughter, working... (more) |
|
|
On the Occasion Of Your Graduation (2011) |
|
| Robert Dawson |
|
A thesis advisor entrusts his Ph.D. student with the responsibility of determining what to do with his discovery that mathematics contains inconsistencies.
This is one of several works of fiction that... (more) |
|
|
The One Best Bet [Flashlight] (1911) |
|
| Samuel Hopkins Adams |
|
“Average Jones” is a collection of eleven tales of detection, solved by a very smart, young man, Mr. Jones. His catchy alias came about because “his parents had foredoomed him to it when they furnished... (more) |
|
|
One Hundred Twenty-One Days (2014) |
|
| Michèle Audin (Author) / Christiana Hills (Translator) |
|
This tragic "novel" by mathematician and Oulipo member Michèle Audin follows the lives of three fictional mathematicians (Christian Mortsauf, Robert Gorenstein and Andre Silberberg) through the first... (more) |
|
|
The One Plus One (2014) |
|
| Jojo Moyes |
|
The title presumably primarily refers to the couple in the romance: Jess (a single mom struggling to make ends meet by working as a cleaning woman) and Ed (a well-off client of hers, facing charges for... (more) |
|
|
One Under the Eight (1994) |
|
| Catherine Aird |
|
A creative but simple mathematical code is utilized by a criminal to secretly pass a number (one that will disable a security system) to an accomplice during a wine tasting event in this short detective... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Only Say the Word (2005) |
|
| Niall Williams |
|
This novel about loss and grief includes a minor character (the protagonist's brother) who has mathematical talent and "retreats" into numbers. He believes that "for every problem there is a true and perfect solution" and eventually applies his skills to gambling (apparently providing the perfect solution to the problems of his life.) (more) |
|
|
Onto Infinity (2002) |
|
| David Alex |
|
A young mathematician and his older wife struggle to accept her fate as she slowly dies of cancer.
As you might guess since I maintain a website on mathematical fiction, I am not one of those who see... (more) |
|
|
The Ore Miner's Wife (2003) |
|
| Karl Iagnemma |
|
A miner who spends his spare time secretly working on geometry problems arouses the suspicions of his God fearing wife when she comes upon his cryptic writings and follows him to a meeting with a visiting... (more) |
|
|
Orpheus Lost: A Novel (2007) |
|
| Janette Turner Hospital |
|
This book is simultaneously a beautiful love story with frequent allusions to the myth of Orpheus, a political thriller, and a gut wrenching tear jerker about people whose lives are destroyed by war. ... (more) |
|
|
Our Lady, Queen of Undecidable Propositions (2016) |
|
| Hugh C Culik |
|
A story that uses math as both a language and a metaphor for a poetic discussion of the human condition involving a Catholic priest.
Published in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Volume 6 Issue 2 (July 2016), pages 230-240.
The math in this story is questionable, at best.
(more) |
|
|
Out of the Sun: A Novel (1996) |
|
| Robert Goddard |
|
Harry Barnett (first introduced in the novel Into the
Blue) investigates the circumstances that lead to
his son's accident. The son, 33 year old math genius, lies in a coma
and the accident is somehow... (more) |
|
|
The Oxford Murders (2004) |
|
| Guillermo Martinez |
|
A young, Argentinian mathematician visiting the UK is drawn into a murder mystery when his landlord (a woman who had worked as a code breaker during World War II) is killed. A clue and the words "The... (more) |
|
|
The Papers of A.J. Wentworth, B.A. (1949) |
|
| Humphry Francis Ellis |
|
This is a humorous book about A J Wentworth, school master at a British school, who teaches Algebra to 11-13 year old children. The entire novel has a touch of Wodehouse to it as it follows the bumbling... (more) |
|
|
Papos (2007) |
|
| Alex Rose |
|
A short piece which mixes up historical facts/pseudo-facts from Greek history with rich imagination to discuss the discovery of irrational numbers (Pythagoras, Hippasus), the vanishing point in perspective... (more) |
|
|
Parade's End (1924) |
|
| Ford Madox Ford |
|
Although the British aristocracy, women's liberation, marital infidelity, and World War I are more important to this acclaimed novel, math arises a few times since the primary protagonist, Tietjens, is... (more) |
|
|
Les Particules élémentaires [Elementary Particles] (1998) |
|
| Michel Houellebecq |
|
The following description is based on material sent to me by Annie-Michel Pajus (IREM PARIS 7) in French. Any error below is likely to be a mistake that I made in attempting to translate it.
This novel... (more) |
|
|
Pascal's Wager (2001) |
|
| Nancy Rue |
|
A math graduate student working in K-theory meets a young philosophy professor who challenges her atheistic beliefs with Blaise Pascal's famous "wager". Mathematics takes a back seat to theology in this... (more) |
|
|
Paul Bunyan versus the Conveyor Belt (1949) |
|
| William Hazlett Upson |
|
A clever "twist" on the usual Mobius band story.
Answers the age old question: How can you win lots of money betting
against poor saps who don't understand topology?
I use this story with children... (more) |
|
|
The Penultimate Conjecture (1999) |
|
| Leonard Michaels |
|
This is the most mathematical of Leonard Michaels' seven stories about the brilliant but anti-social UCLA mathematician, Nachman. In it, Nachman attends a conference in San Francisco at which a Swedish... (more) |
|
|
Percentage Player (1958) |
|
| Leslie Charteris |
|
A really hilarious and confusing tale which has to be read very slowly to get the full gist, as it happens in almost every single probability problem one tries to solve. How many times have you been... (more) |
|
|
Perelman’s Refusal [Les Refus de Grigori Perelman]
(2017) |
|
| Philippe Zaouati |
|
I was quite concerned when I first heard that the American Mathematical Society was publishing this "novel"
that promised "to immerse [the reader] in the tormented mind" of Grigori Perelman. I became... (more) |
|
|
A Perfect Equation (The Secret Scientists of London) (2022) |
|
| Elizabeth Everett |
|
Miss Letitia Fenley wishes to compete for the prestigious Rosewood Prize for Mathematics. Unfortunately, she is distracted from her research by her role in a secret society of female scientists in Victorian... (more) |
|
|
A Person of Interest (2008) |
|
| Susan Choi |
|
Professor Lee, an older math professor at a small mid-western university becomes a suspect when a package bomb kills the young and popular professor in the office next to his. More of a serious psychological... (more) |
|
|
Petersburg (1913) |
|
| Andrei Bely |
|
In this modernist Russian novel, the revolutionary Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov is charged with the task of killing a Tsarist official ... his own father. In addition to mathematical terminology that... (more) |
|
|
A Piece of Justice (1995) |
|
| Jill Paton Walsh |
|
The mathematics of tilings and quilting play background roles in this mystery in which a graduate student attempts to write a biography of the (fictitious) mathematician Gideon Summerfield. Summerfield... (more) |
|
|
Pieces of Pi (2006) |
|
| David Bartell |
|
A socially inept cubicle worker becomes obsessed with making sense of the controversial Biblical passage (I Kings 7:23-26) which many interpret as claiming that the value of π is exactly three (therefore... (more) |
|
|
PopCo (2004) |
|
| Scarlett Thomas |
|
Alice was raised by her grandparents, a mathematician and a cryptographer, and now uses what she learned from them to make mathematical puzzles for children. Her employer, the giant toy company "PopCo",... (more) |
|
|
Porter Piper (1849) |
|
| Anonymous |
|
A very light, very badly stereotyped, two-dimensional story about one Porter Piper. He was a born genius, one destined to be a top-class mathematician. So much so that when he was delivered by his mother,... (more) |
|
|
Powerball 310 (2007) |
|
| K.T. Reid |
|
The premise of this amusing crime caper is a gang of experts who pull of a successful theft of a $310 million Powerball lottery jackpot by generating a winning ticket just after the numbers have been... (more) |
|
|
Practical Joke (2016) |
|
| Adam Ehrlich Sachs |
|
A very short story in which a knot theorist playing a practical joke on his overly serious son lies (in both senses of the word) on his deathbed and tells him "The solution to the Kaiserling Conjecture... (more) |
|
|
Presque Vue (2021) |
|
| Tochi Onyebuchi |
|
A character deals with the voice in her head (which seems to like to do math), her aging parents, and her daughter.
I am grateful to Aidan Tompkins for bringing this short story to my attention, but... (more) |
|
|
Prime (2013) |
|
| Steve Erickson |
|
Because he is jealous of the relative success of colleagues he considers his intellectual inferiors, a mathematician kidnaps a celebrity to learn the numerical secret of fame.
The kidnapper in this... (more) |
|
|
Prince of Mathematics: Carl Friedrich Gauss (2006) |
|
| Margaret B.W. Tent |
|
A fictionalized account of the life and achievements of one of history's greatest mathematicians, told in a style which is appropriate for children but also maintains the interest of adult readers.
(I'm... (more) |
|
|
Princess Elizabeth's Spy: A Maggie Hope Mystery (2012) |
|
| Susan Elia MacNeal |
|
Maggie Hope is assigned to stay with the royal family. As we know from her first appearance in Mr. Churchill's Secretary, Maggie has an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Wellesley and was about... (more) |
|
|
Principles of Emotion (2024) |
|
| Sara Read |
|
Meg Brightwood grew up as a mathematical prodigy with an overbearing mathematician father and an absent mother. She later quit her academic job due to a combination of her crippling anxiety and the sexism... (more) |
|
|
Probabilities (1995) |
|
| Michael Stein |
|
Sixteen year old Will Sterling is the protagonist of this "coming of age story" that throws just a little math in with the usual teen-angst and sexual exploration.
The author is very good at letting you... (more) |
|
|
Probability Murder (2006) |
|
| Michael Flynn |
|
This amusing, if a bit farcical, little tale unfolds in a bar on a very rainy night, where Sam Hourani, a homicide detective, recounts to the storyteller how he thinks that a recent “accident”... (more) |
|
|
The Problem of Cell 13 (1907) |
|
| Jacques Futrelle |
|
"The story which introduces Professor S. F. X. van Dusen,
professional scientific supergenius, who lends his talents
to solving baffling mysteries. He is described as primarily
... (more) |
|
|
Problems (1979) |
|
| John Updike |
|
What might otherwise be a standard short story about a man who regrets leaving his wife for his lover is recast by this famous author as a list of math homework problems. In one problem, where the man... (more) |
|
|
Problems for Self-Study (2002) |
|
| Charles Yu |
|
The life of a mathematical physicist -- from earning his PhD, through marriage, fatherhood and into a midlife crisis -- presented in the form of homework exercises from a math book.
We first meet... (more) |
|
|
Professor and Colonel (1987) |
|
| Ruth Berman |
|
In this unusual story, we get to see another side to Sherlock Holmes' arch enemy, the brilliant but evil mathematician Professor Moriarty. Here, rather than perpetrating a crime, Moriarty is merely visiting with his brother, discussing the significance of his research into asteroid dynamics. (See also Asimov's take on this same subject.) (more) |
|
|
Professor Conundrum Mysteries! (2008) |
|
| Bill Streifer |
|
My book, Professor Conundrum Mysteries!...combines math education (non-fiction) and historical fiction.
The book consists of five stories that take place during important events in 20th century U.S.... (more) |
|
|
Professor Morgan's Moon (1899) |
|
| Stanley Waterloo |
|
A young mathematician asks for the hand of a senior mathematician's beautiful (and clever) daughter, but is refused on the grounds that his inability to support her financially was a mathematical certainty.... (more) |
|
|
Progress (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
The mathematics of ancient Egypt can look very strange to us today. For example, although they did not have many fractions, they did know about the number 2/3. Strangely, however, it took a page of computation... (more) |
|
|
Proof (2000) |
|
| David Auburn |
|
This Pulitzer Prize winning play (now also a film) focuses on a daughter who took care of her father after his mental disorder forced him to give up his successful career as a mathematician. After the... (more) |
|
|
Proof Geometric Construction Can Solve All Love Affairs (2017) |
|
| Takahashi Manbou (lyricist) / Ane Manbou (illustrator) |
|
This is not a short story or novel or movie, it is a music video by Japanese musician "Manbo-p" (featuring manga-style illustrations by his sister). As the title implies, it is a romance in which a boy... (more) |
|
|
A Proof of God (2004) |
|
| Colin Adams |
|
A mathematician is approached by a seemingly crazy old man who claims to have a proof of the existence of God, but later it seems that he might not be so crazy after all in this hilarious spoof from Adams'... (more) |
|
|
The Proof of Love (2011) |
|
| Catherine Hall |
|
A Cambridge maths grad student takes a holiday in England's remote and rural Lake District, hoping to be able to make progress on his research but instead learning more about his own humanity. A major... (more) |
|
|
Properties of Light (2000) |
|
| Rebecca Goldstein |
|
This is a beautifully written novel about a theoretical physicist who
hates the daughter of a more senior physicist whose work he
admires. The real plot of the novel revolves around why he hates her,... (more) |
|
|
Pröfung läuft: Eine Erzählung in n Testabschnitten (2018) |
|
| Dietmar Dath |
|
This short story which appeared in the January 2018 issue of the German magazine Konkret is more about politics/economics than math, but it features frequent high level discussions of mathematical logic... (more) |
|
|
The Purloined Letter (1844) |
|
| Edgar Allan Poe |
|
"This is the third and last C. Auguste Dupin mystery. The
Prefect of Paris police explains a very delicate situation
to Dupin, involving a royal letter whose possession grants
its bearer great... (more) |
|
|
The Puzzling Adventures of Dr. Ecco (1988) |
|
| Dennis Shasha |
|
The first in a sequence of delightful books. This one offers 38 puzzles packaged very well as a collection of stories solved by Dr. Ecco. To introduce him:
“Dr. Jacob Ecco is a mathematical... (more) |
|
|
Pythagoras Eagle & the Music of the Spheres (2003) |
|
| Anne Carse Nolting |
|
A very well-written, highly mathematical novel for 5th — 6th graders. Three children — Shawna, Adin and Tavia — are math aficionados and are trying to crack the Beale Ciphers, a set... (more) |
|
|
Pythagoras the Mathemagician (2010) |
|
| Karim El Koussa |
|
This novel concerns the ancient Greek mathematician to whom we generally attribute the theorem relating the lengths of the sides of a right triangle. However, it focuses much more on his religious, mystical,... (more) |
|
|
Pythagoras' Revenge: A Mathematical Mystery (2009) |
|
| Arturo Sangalli |
|
Freelance science journalist Sangalli has written a book which presents some historical information about Pythagoras and his beliefs in the form of a novel of the detail driven conspiracy theory adventure... (more) |
|
|
Pythagoras's Darkest Hour (2007) |
|
| Colin Adams |
|
A humorous short story from the author of Mathematically Bent which tells the true story of the discovery of the Pythagorean Theorem. Well, actually, perhaps it isn't exactly true...but it is so good,... (more) |
|
|
Pythagorean Crimes (2006) |
|
| Tefcros Michaelides |
|
This murder mystery takes place amid the exciting developments occurring in the mathematical and artistic communities in Europe between 1900 and 1931. Much of what one will learn by reading this book... (more) |
|
|
Q.E.D. (1977) |
|
| Jack Eric Morpurgo |
|
A short, heart-breaking tale which captures the heartache which, not so uncommonly, befalls a researcher who makes a monumental discovery, only to find that independently and unbeknownst to her, someone... (more) |
|
|
The Quantum Weirdness of the Almost-Kiss (2021) |
|
| Amy Noelle Parks |
|
In this young adult romance, Evie Beckham is an extremely anxious teenager who loves math and attends a STEM magnet school. She is starting to get interested in dating, but is unaware that her longtime... (more) |
|
|
The Queen's Gambit (2020) |
|
| Scott Frank (writer&director) /Allan Scott (writer) /Walter Tevis (writer) |
|
This popular TV mini-series about the personal trials of a chess prodigy is based on a novel. Interestingly, as I learned from Lauren Tubbs, a tiny bit of math was added for the screen adaptation:
One... (more) |
|
|
Question 3 (2016) |
|
| Martin Sandahl (Director and Writer) |
|
A short film about a boy with Asperger's Syndrome who competes in the International Mathematical Olympiad. However, neither the mathematical problems nor the boy's success in the competition is the main... (more) |
|
|
Qui perd gagne! (2003) |
|
| Laurent Bénégui (Director) |
|
In this French film, a math teacher claims to have a system for winning the lottery.
I tracked this down after seeing the page on your site a couple of days ago. It is a very enjoyable movie, but... (more) |
|
|
Quicksilver: The Baroque Cycle Volume 1 (2003) |
|
| Neal Stephenson |
|
This long novel from the author of Cryptonomicon does for 17th Century mathematics what that earlier novel did for the 20th century. Namely, it deifies some great historical mathematicians (this time... (more) |
|
|
Quod Erat Demonstrandum (2013) |
|
| Andrei Gruzsniczki (Director and Screenwriter) |
|
A mathematician is persecuted for failing to join the communist party in this film that starkly portrays life in Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu.
In the film, Sorin Parvu has proved an important... (more) |
|
|
The Rabbit Factor [Jäniskerroin] (2020) |
|
| Antti Tuomainen |
|
After his anti-social tendencies get him fired from his job as an actuary, the mathematically obsessed Henri inherits his deceased brother's adventure park, along with his tremendous debt to a dangerous... (more) |
|
|
Racconti Matematici (2006) |
|
| Claudio Bartocci (Editor) |
|
This Italian collection of mathematical stories includes some short stories that appear elsewhere in this database (often translated into Italian) and some non-fictional essays that would not be appropriate... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Randall and the River of Time (1950) |
|
| Cecil Scott Forester |
|
Charles Randall meets two people who change his life while he is on leave from fighting in World War I: a patent lawyer for whom he designs an improved flare and the seductive wife of a fellow soldier.... (more) |
|
|
Reality Conditions (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
The title story in the collection of the same name, this short story follows a mathematics grad student to a workshop at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. Although the story contains no supernatural... (more) |
|
|
Reality Conditions: short mathematical fiction (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
The stories in this collection of 16 original short works of mathematical fiction are different from each other in many ways: some are serious and some funny, some are realistic and some fantastical,... (more) |
|
|
Recess (Episode: A Genius Among Us) (2000) |
|
| Brian Hamill |
|
This episode of Disney's Saturday Morning cartoon "Recess" is clearly a parody of the film "Good Will Hunting". I hope this doesn't lower anyone's opinion of me...but I personally liked it better than... (more) |
|
|
Der Rechenmeister [aka The Mathematician] (1999) |
|
| Dieter Jörgensen |
|
When I browsed through your list I found one book missing that I have in my library: "Der Rechenmeister" by Dieter Jörgensen is a novel describing the life of Niccolo Tartaglia in Venice and his battle... (more) |
|
|
Refund (1938) |
|
| Fritz Karinthy (original) / Percival Wilde (English Adaptation) |
|
A former student demands that his tuition be refunded because he feels his education was worthless, but loses his bid when he is tricked by the mathematics master.
This entry refers to the 1938 adaptation... (more) |
|
|
Regarding Roderer (1994) |
|
| Guillermo Martinez |
|
A short novel about Gustavo Roderer, a brilliant but troubled young man in Argentina. Mathematics is not a central theme, but arises as Roderer's friend (the narrator) talks with him about the philosophical... (more) |
|
|
La Resta [The Remainder] (2015) |
|
| Alia Trabucco Zerán |
|
Two friends from modern day Santiago travel through Chile using "mortuary mathematics" to attempt to better understand the legacy of their country's dictatorship:
[A]nd just as I'm calming down and... (more) |
|
|
The Return of Moriarty (1974) |
|
| John Gardner |
|
The British spy thriller novelist, perhaps now best known
for his 007 novels, wrote three novels starring Professor
Moriarty, THE RETURN OF MORIARTY (UK title MORIARTY),
THE REVENGE OF MORIARTY... (more) |
|
|
Rincorse (1994) |
|
| Dario Voltolini |
|
The title means "Run-ups" in Italian. The book tells the story
of a young, talented mathematician who travels trough Italy
interviewing for jobs at various companies. During one of the
interviews... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Rites of Love and Math (2010) |
|
| Edward Frenkel / Reine Graves |
|
UC-Berkeley mathematical physicist Edward Frenkel wrote and stars in this short film about a mathematician who is determined to kill himself after he discovers the formula for love.
The film is inspired... (more) |
|
|
Rithmatic (2015) |
|
| B.J. Novak |
|
A school principal secretly proposes to his students that they all just agree not to bother with math in school:
“Now do I wish you all knew math? Were great at math? Were f---ing mathematicians?... (more) |
|
|
Robbins v. New York (2008) |
|
| Colin Adams |
|
The author of the Mathematical Intelligencer's "Mathematically Bent" column has a talent for making me laugh, and this piece which has the US Supreme Court justices debating higher math and modern physics... (more) |
|
|
|
|
The Romanian Gambit: A Statistical Spy Novel (2020) |
|
| Elliott Ostler |
|
This espionage novel attempts to teach the reader about statistical analysis.
Alex:
The Romanian Gambit, A Statistical Spy Novel (2020) by Elliott Ostler, is now available on Amazon, and IMHO belongs... (more) |
|
|
Rooster: An American Tragedy (2000) |
|
| Brian Fielding |
|
A gifted artist suffering from leprosy encounters Tamara Browne, a quirky
former math grad student who is interested in "humanistic mathematics".
"While this book is not based on mathematics, it... (more) |
|
|
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead (1967) |
|
| Tom Stoppard |
|
This brilliant, weird play, retelling the story of Shakespeare's Hamlet
from the point of view of two "throw away" characters, unfortunately has
very little mathematics in it. However, every few days... (more) |
|
|
Roten av minus én [The Square Root of Minus One] (2006) |
|
| Atle Næss |
|
There are three different levels of reality in this novel: On the one hand it is the story of Terje Huuse, a Norwegian mathematician undergoing a midlife crisis. That part of the story is presented through... (more) |
|
|
Rough Strife (1980) |
|
| Lynne Sharon Schwartz |
|
This is the story of the courtship, marriage and affairs of Ivan (who works on the business side of the art world) and Caroline (a math professor).
Although there are plenty of clues to the knowledgeable... (more) |
|
|
Royal Highness (Königliche Hoheit) (1909) |
|
| Thomas Mann |
|
At the heart of Thomas Mann's novel, “Royal Highness,” is the courtship and eventual marriage of Klaus Heinrich, the heir to a fictional German principality, and Imma Spoelmann, the daughter... (more) |
|
|
The Rubbish Researchers Puzzle (2018) |
|
| Michael W. Lucht |
|
Thanks to Dr. Allan Goldberg for bringing to my attention this humorous short story about a math professor hiding in a New Zealand pub from an angry looking mob of blue-eyed Pacific Islanders.
It concerns... (more) |
|
|
Rubicon Beach (1986) |
|
| Steve Erickson |
|
One of the three plot lines in this bizarre novel follows a mathematician who has made a (supposedly) horrific discovery.
Since there are no direct connections between the other two characters and the... (more) |
|
|
Rucker - A Life Fractal by Eli Halberstam (1991) |
|
| John Allen Paulos |
|
Like Lem's De Impossibilitate Vitae and Prognoscendi , this is a work of fiction that takes the form of a book review. (As Paulos explains in his introduction, "Reviewing [a] book which hasn't been written... (more) |
|
|
The Rule of Four (2004) |
|
| Ian Caldwell / Dustin Thomason |
|
There is an enigmatic book from the late 15th century called Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, written by an Italian monk, Francesco Colonna (available at gutenberg.org for download). The book chronicles the... (more) |
|
|
Rumpled Stiltskin (2004) |
|
| Colin Adams |
|
Do you remember the old Fractured Fairy Tales segment on Rocky and Bullwinkle in which classic stories were updated with a twist? This is just like those. The old Grimm's Brother tale is retold, but... (more) |
|
|
The Sabre Squadron (1966) |
|
| Simon Raven |
|
Daniel Mond, a British PhD candidate in mathematics, finds himself in mortal danger after traveling to Göttingen in the 1950s to analyze papers by the deceased German mathematician Dortmund.
I had... (more) |
|
|
Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz (1997) |
|
| Irene Dische |
|
Like many other mathematicians in fiction (and in real life too?), the protagonist in this novel is brilliant when it comes to calculations but has difficulty with the most commonplace examples of human... (more) |
|
|
San (2000) |
|
| Lan Samantha Chang |
|
A short story in the collection "Hunger" about a girl who becomes interested in mathematics (especially probability) when her gambler father deserts his family. She does not succeed as a college student and learns in the end that in both math and life, it is the mysteries (and not their solutions) which are of real interest.
(more) |
|
|
The Sand-Reckoner (2000) |
|
| Gillian Bradshaw |
|
In this historical novel whose title is copied from one Archimedes' own works, the famous Greek mathematician is your typical math nerd, always
so wrapped up in his computations that he is barely aware... (more) |
|
|
Saraswati's Way (1978) |
|
| Monika Schroder |
|
This is a novel written for very young adults (age 10 or so). Chronicles a mathematically gifted young boy's search for resources and a tutor from whom he can learn more mathematics than his local teachers... (more) |
|
|
Satisfactory Proof (2005) |
|
| Cynthia Morrison Phoel |
|
A Master's degree student pouts and complains about the people around him as he earns his Master's degree in mathematics at a Bulgarian university.
Although the titular phrase "satisfactory proof" appears... (more) |
|
|
Say Wen (1930) |
|
| Ellis Parker Butler |
|
If you have a story’s tagline as...
“I assure you that I am not an unduly formal woman, but I consider it decidedly undignified for a dean of a co-educational college to hold a Professor of Higher... (more) |
|
|
School Scandalle (2004) |
|
| Marla Weiss |
|
In 80 short chapters (each of which has the word "First" in its title), this book relates the sordid details in the professional life of a computer science and math teacher at a private school in Florida.... (more) |
|
|
A Season of Flirtation (2023) |
|
| Julia Justiss |
|
Lady Laura Pomeroy's interest in mathematics makes her an unsuitable romantic interest in the 19th century:
Few gentlemen, himself included, could view as a prime matrimonial candidate a female who... (more) |
|
|
Sebastian (1968) |
|
| David Greene (director) |
|
A film about a British mathematician trying to break the German codes during World War II. (So, add this to the growing list of works of mathematical fiction inspired by Alan Turing!) I must admit that I have not yet seen the film, but you've got to love its tagline:
We can't tell you what he does (it's an international secret) but he does it with 100 girls... and does it the best!
(more) |
|
|
The Secret Integration (1964) |
|
| Thomas Pynchon |
|
The title is a pun relating the operation from calculus (the definite
integral of a function) to the controversial attempt to solve many of the
problems of race relations in America (the integration... (more) |
|
|
The Secret Life of Amanda K. Woods (1998) |
|
| Ann Cameron |
|
(A preteen novel, obscurely set in the 50s, only skimmed by
me. I was attracted by the Moebius strip on the cover of the
Scholastic edition. It was a National Book Award finalist, I
presume... (more) |
|
|
Secrets to the Grave (2011) |
|
| Tami Hoag |
|
Mathematician Zander Zahn is suspected of having murdered an artist in this follow-up to the novel "Deeper than the Dead". Almost no mathematics is actually discussed, not even the tiny amount one often... (more) |
|
|
Sekret Enigmy (1979) |
|
| Roman Wionczek
|
|
Although Alan Turing tends to get much of the credit for breaking the Nazi "Enigma" codes during World War II, three Polish mathematicians did preliminary work that (depending on who you ask) either equally brilliant and important or even more so. This film tells their story, featuring some real acts of heroism.
(more) |
|
|
Serial Killer Sudoku (2009) |
|
| Shelley Freydont |
|
In this sequel to The Sudoku Murder, the former government mathematician who has taken over the puzzle museum in her old hometown catches a serial killer who leaves a sudoku at each crime scene. There... (more) |
|
|
Seven Wonders (2014) |
|
| Ben Mezrich |
|
The hero of this conspiracy theory adventure has -- or had -- a twin brother who was an anti-social, OCD math genius precisely following the standard literary stereotype. However, he was murdered after... (more) |
|
|
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974) |
|
| Nicholas Meyer |
|
Meyer presents an alternative view of Sherlock Holmes in this surprising novel: that of a deluded drug addict. In particular, and of interest to those who visit this Website, we learn that Professor Moriarty is only a kindly mathematician who once tutored Holmes in mathematics. The idea that he is a criminal mastermind (as we learn in Conan Doyle's stories) is just part of Holmes' paranoia.
(more) |
|
|
The Shackles of Conviction (2008) |
|
| James R. Meyer |
|
This novel intersperses a fictionalized account of the life of Kurt Gödel with the modern tale of an engineer who realizes (and eventually convinces the world) that Gödel's proof was flawed and that his (more) |
|
|
The Shadow of the God (1900) |
|
| Charles Newman Hall |
|
A cute, poetically-written story set in the Yucatan, where Ethel, her cousin, Tom, and Tom’s college friend, Whitman, went looking at the ruins of an ancient Aztec “Temple of Huitzilopochtli”.
Whitman... (more) |
|
|
Shakespeare Predicted it All (2003) |
|
| Dietmar Dath |
|
An artistically composed piece about Georg Cantor, inventor of the theory of transfinite cardinals, in the form of a dialogue between the characters "1" and "2", both of whom are either Cantor or Hamlet.... (more) |
|
|
The Shape of Content: Creative Writing in Mathematics and Science (2008) |
|
| Chandler Davis (editor) / Marjorie Senechal (editor) / Jan Zwicky (editor) |
|
This collection of writings associated with the Workshops on Creative Writing in Mathematics and Science at the math institute at Banff contains mathematical fiction along with mathematical poetry, scientific... (more) |
|
|
She is Not Invisible (2013) |
|
| Marcus Sedgwick |
|
In this young adult thriller, a blind teenager and her younger brother search for their missing father, a successful author obsessed with coincidence and the number 354. Although the approach is more supernatural and numerological than mathematical, there is also some flavor of probability and discussion of such things as Benford's Law.
(more) |
|
|
She Spies (Episode: Message from Kassar) (2003) |
|
| Vince Manze (script) / Joe Livecchi (script) / Steven Long Mitchell (script) |
|
Although I lived in the US and had a TV in 2003, I somehow completely missed “She Spies”. I had no idea such a show existed. And so, while watching this episode to see whether it really is “mathematical... (more) |
|
|
She Wrote the Book (1946) |
|
| Oscar Brodney (writer) / Warren Wilson (writer) / Charles Lamont (director) |
|
A modest and shy female math professor develops amnesia and completely changes her behavior when she comes to believe she is the author of steamy romance models. According to Burkard Polster and Marty... (more) |
|
|
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) |
|
| Guy Ritchie (director) |
|
There is not much actual mathematics in this sequel which, like its predecessor, features a version of Sherlock Holmes portrayed by Robert Downey Jr. as more of an action hero than the one in Sir Arthur... (more) |
|
|
Shooting the Sun (2004) |
|
| Max Byrd |
|
Historical mathematicians Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage play supporting roles in this novel about an expedition into uncharted Indian territory to capture the first photograph of a solar eclipse at... (more) |
|
|
Silas P. Cornu's Dry Calculator (1898) |
|
| Henry Hering |
|
A very hilarious short story about a man who wants to build a mechanical calculator to evaluate logarithms but has success building a machine that can do only addition and multiplication. On the other... (more) |
|
|
Silent Cruise (2002) |
|
| Timothy Taylor |
|
In an open forum on mathematics at the BIRS Website, Canadian author Taylor does a great job of explaining why I am listing this short story here:
[In this story] I introduce [the characters]
Dett... (more) |
|
|
Simple Genius (2007) |
|
| David Baldacci |
|
A small child with an inexplicable ability to factor large numbers threatens the security of the Western world in this political thriller from popular author Baldacci. Although it is nice to see mathematics... (more) |
|
|
The Simpsons: Girls Just Want to Have Sums (2006) |
|
| Matt Selman |
|
In this episode from the 17th season of the hit cartoon The Simpsons, the principal of Bart and Lisa's school makes a sexist comment (clearly a reference to the controversial comments from Harvard President... (more) |
|
|
The Sinister Researches of C.P. Ransom (1951) |
|
| Homer C. Nearing Jr. |
|
"[D]escribed on the cover as a science fiction novel, which is two
mistakes in three words...it is [mathematical fiction], and it is a
collection of short stories that originally appeared in The Magazine
of... (more) |
|
|
Sir Cumference and the... (1997) |
|
| Cindy Neuschwander |
|
These are pun filled picture books. To be honest, they do not appeal to me at all; I would give them low ratings for both literary quality and mathematical content. However, as you can see from the comments... (more) |
|
|
The Sirdar's Chess-Board (1885) |
|
| Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer |
|
A military bride travelling in Afghanistan is surprised when a mystic is able to cut up a chess board ("with three snips of my scissors") and put it back together so that the number of squares has increased... (more) |
|
|
Sixty Million Trillion Combinations (1980) |
|
| Isaac Asimov |
|
Tom Trumbull, one of Asimov's regular "Black Widower" mystery
characters, wants to convince an eccentric mathematician (working on
Goldbach's conjecture) that his secret password is not safe.
Combinatorics... (more) |
|
|
Slightly Perfect / Are you with it? (1941) |
|
| George Malcolm-Smith (Novel) / Sam Perrin (Script) / George Balzer (Script) |
|
Eggheaded actuary Milton Northey Haskins quits his job upon learning that his company has lost money due to his misplaced decimal point and he joins a carnival in the 1941 novel Slightly Perfect. This... (more) |
|
|
Smilla's Sense of Snow (1992) |
|
| Peter Hoeg |
|
"Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen is a part-Inuit Dane who is an expert on
ice and snow, and a mathematician to boot. She is depressed and/or
anxious most of the time, and the story is very dark, depressing,... (more) |
|
|
Sneakers (1992) |
|
| Phil Alden Robinson (director) |
|
Complex espionage story, more about computers than mathematics.
However, mathematics is clearly an underlying theme and in one scene
the mysterious mathematician Gunter Janek lectures on mathematical
aspects... (more) |
|
|
|
|
The Song of the Geometry Instructor (1985) |
|
| Ralph M. Berry |
|
While snowed in at his home, a geometer writes to his former lover about his students, his discoveries and how much he misses her.
This is one of those literary art pieces by an author for whom mathematics... (more) |
|
|
Songs My Mother Never Taught Me (2007) |
|
| Selçuk Altun |
|
After his mother's death, a young Turkish man seeks his father's killer. His father was a very charismatic, conceited and famous mathematician, but aside from that there is little math in the book. The... (more) |
|
|
Sophie Simon Solves them All (2010) |
|
| Lisa Graff |
|
A 100-page novel for 2nd graders about a math genius, Sophie Simon, whose parents are always worried that their daughter is not “well-adjusted”. Sophie, on the other hand, wants to do math... (more) |
|
|
Sophie's Diary (2004) |
|
| Dora Musielak |
|
Sophie Germain famously studied mathematics at night by candlelight despite her parents' insistence that she give up this unfeminine discipline. She then went on to become one of the great mathematician's... (more) |
|
|
Sorority House (1956) |
|
| Jordan Park (Cyril M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl) |
|
Sorority House is a lesbian pulp novel written in 1956 by Cyril M. Kornbluth (1923-1958) and Frederik Pohl (1919- ) under the pen name "Jordan Park". The main character is a mentally unstable young... (more) |
|
|
Space (1911) |
|
| John Buchan |
|
This mystical story, as recounted by a lawyer, is about a brilliant mathematician ("an erratic genius who had written some articles in Mind on that dreary subject, the mathematical conception of infinity",... (more) |
|
|
Spherical Mirrors, plane murders (2017) |
|
| Tefcros Michaelides |
|
Essentially all I know about this book is that it is a murder mystery which combines the conquest of Cyprus by Richard the Lionheart during the Crusades with a puzzle of optics posed in Ibn al-Haytham's... (more) |
|
|
The Spoilers (1968) |
|
| Desmond Bagley |
|
June, the daughter of Sir Robert Hellier, a wealthy movie moghul, dies of an overdose of heroin dissolved in a solution of methylamphetamine. So Sir Hellier decides to finance a no-cost-spared war against... (more) |
|
|
Spying on My Dreams (2000) |
|
| Laurence Howard |
|
In my second novel, Spying on My Dreams, my protagonist, a mathematician working for a computer game company, uses fuzzy logic to integrate Eastern and Western thought, and hence finds the meaning of... (more) |
|
|
The Square Root of 2 (2015) |
|
| Hackie Reitman (writer and director) / Bernard Salzmann (director) |
|
A movie about the difficulties faced by an autistic young woman with over-protective parents who attends college to pursue a career in mathematics. Author/director Reitman is an M.D. with an interest in... (more) |
|
|
The Square Root of Murder (2002) |
|
| Paul Zindel |
|
A murder mystery written for a middle school aged audience in which a calculus professor is found pinned to a chalk board by a bolt fired from a crossbow. A formula on the board turns out to be an essential clue (though it involves only elementary arithmetic).
This novel for young readers should not be confused with the adult mystery novel with the same title by Ada Madison.
(more) |
|
|
The Square Root of Murder (2011) |
|
| Ada Madison |
|
Math professor Sophie Knowles turns amateur detective when an unpopular colleague is found dead in his office in this entertaining but light mystery novel.
From reading comments at Amazon, I have learned... (more) |
|
|
Stand and Deliver (1987) |
|
| Ramon Menendez |
|
Edward James Olmos plays Jaime Escalante, "a real-life math teacher in East L.A.. This is
really unique. The hero's heroism consists in teaching mathematics! Obviously, I've gotta love this one. So... (more) |
|
|
Stand-In (1937) |
|
| Tay Garnett
|
|
Leslie Howard plays a typical Hollywood mathematical genius: emotionless, conceited, and convinced that everything can be understood through mathematics. (Well, one out of three isn't bad!) It takes a trip to Tinsel Town and a beautiful actress to make him see the errors of his ways.
(more) |
|
|
The Stargazers (1986) |
|
| Barbara Susan Lefever |
|
An historical novel based on Mason and Dixon. (Includes references!) It was self-published in a first printing of 700, and a second printing of 200. The author is/was a member of the Pennsylvania Society... (more) |
|
|
Stay Close, Little Ghost (2013) |
|
| Oliver Serang |
|
This is a bizarre, psychedelic and semi-autobiographical novel about a man named Oliver who has an uncanny ability to find four-leaf clovers, spends much of his time working on a mathematical problem,... (more) |
|
|
The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007) |
|
| Iain Banks |
|
Alban McGill is a reluctant member of a family whose wealth is derived from the creation of an immensely popular board game. The three main plots of the novel (which are intertwined) concern his childhood... (more) |
|
|
Stella Maris (2022) |
|
| Cormac McCarthy |
|
Readers of McCarthy's 2022 novel The Passenger learn quickly that its protagonist's sister was a mathematical prodigy who committed suicide. That isolated fact provides motivation for the remainder of... (more) |
|
|
The Steradian Trail (2013) |
|
| M.N. Krish |
|
This mathematical thriller takes place in India where American computer science professor Joshua Ezekiel is attempting to figure out the twisted criminal plot that his recently murdered student had become... (more) |
|
|
Sticks (2002) |
|
| Joan Bauer |
|
Fifth grader Mickey Vernon gets help from his "math whiz" friend in beating a bully at pool in this novel for children. Some reviewers complained that the plot was slow and that the harping on mathematics... (more) |
|
|
Still She Haunts Me (2001) |
|
| Katie Roiphe |
|
A novel about the life of Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll). I have not
read it, and it most certainly focuses more on his affections for Alice than on
his mathematics, but I suppose there must be... (more) |
|
|
The Story of Yung Chang (1900) |
|
| Ernest Bramah (Ernest Bramah Smith) |
|
Before the invention of multiplication tables, a Chinese idol merchant must
sell his wares individually, even if someone wishes to purchase a large
amount, since he has no way to determine how much money... (more) |
|
|
Strange Attractors (1993) |
|
| Rebecca Goldstein |
|
"Strange attractors: Collection of short stories, some of which have
mathematical content. Two stories (the geometry of soap bubbles and
impossible love and strange attractors) figure the same
main... (more) |
|
|
The Strange Case of Mr. Jean D. (1983) |
|
| Joao Filipe Queiro |
|
Published in the Mathematical Intelligencer magazine (Math.Intell. 5, 3 78-90 (1983)) this is the story of a mathematician who has a nightmare: Pi is rational! (Thanks to Nuno Crato for the suggestion.) (more) |
|
|
The Stranger House (2005) |
|
| Reginald Hill |
|
Sam is a young math student from Australia who travels to England seeking information about her grandmother. She finds that her quest becomes intertwined with that of a Spanish historian investigating... (more) |
|
|
Straw Dogs (1971) |
|
| Sam Peckinpah (Director) |
|
Dustin Hoffman stars as an astrophysicist in this violent
Peckinpah film. Before the violence starts, Hoffman's wife plays a
trick on him by changing some signs (+/-) in an equation he is working
with.... (more) |
|
|
Strike Your Heart (2017) |
|
| Amélie Nothomb |
|
This French novel is primarily about jealousy and how it poisons relationships between women. However, one recurring minor character is a Fields medalist working in topology. Like many mathematicians... (more) |
|
|
Strip Search (2007) |
|
| William Bernhardt |
|
A detective is aided by an autistic child in capturing a serial killer who leaves equations written in the blood of his victims at the scenes of the grisly crimes.
In your MathFiction entry for William... (more) |
|
|
A Study in Seduction (2012) |
|
| Nina Rowan |
|
From the back cover: "A heart divided...a passion multiplied...a love unequalled."
Although you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, I could guess from the image of a shirtless man with no chest hair... (more) |
|
|
The Sudoku Murder (2007) |
|
| Shelley Freydont |
|
With the current popularity of sudoku puzzles, it is not surprising that a mystery novel with this title would appear. As a mystery, this one is quite decent. A mathematician who works for a government... (more) |
|
|
A Suitable Boy (1993) |
|
| Vikram Seth |
|
Sometimes referred to as the longest published English novel, this book about a mother's search for a husband for her daughter in post-colonial India has enough pages to devote a few to mathematics. And,... (more) |
|
|
The Sum of All Kisses (2013) |
|
| Julia Quinn |
|
Lady Sarah Pleinsworth and a mathematician who was crippled in a duel are forced to spend time together. Since they despise each other at the outset, we know from the typical plot arc of the romance novel... (more) |
|
|
Summa Mathematica (2002) |
|
| Sean Doolittle |
|
Not really a mystery, but more of a "crime drama" in which a former math professor gets two offers he can't refuse: one from a crime boss who wants to hire him as his accountant and another from the police... (more) |
|
|
Super 30 (2019) |
|
| Vikas Bahl (director) / Sanjeev Dutta (writer) |
|
A superb Bollywood movie based on a real life hero, Anand Kumar, who seems so fictional and yet, so very real in the context of a country like India. The very best in human values which appeal to a higher... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Sweet Tooth (2012) |
|
| Ian McEwan |
|
A female mathematics student at the University of Cambridge gets recruited for intelligence work by the MI5. She tries to explain the Monty Hall Problem to her boyfriend (a budding author), but he fails... (more) |
|
|
Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893) |
|
| Lewis Carroll |
|
The sequel to his somewhat popular book "Sylvie and Bruno" never
achieved the popularity of the original. This lack of success may or
may not be related to Chapter VII (entitled "Mein Herr") of the... (more) |
|
|
The Symbolic Logic of Murder (1960) |
|
| John Reese |
|
Through a combination of biblical mnemonics and Boolean algebra, our
heroes are able to solve a mysterious murder. Appears in Mathematical Magpie.
(more) |
|
|
Symmetry and the Expatriate (2012) |
|
| Tefcros Michaelides |
|
A fictional character obsessed with symmetry is forced by horrific circumstances to travel around Europe in the early 20th century where he meets famous mathematicians, relatives of famous mathematicians,... (more) |
|
|
Szatan Z Siodmej Klasy (1949) |
|
| Kornel Makuszynski |
|
Website visitor David Shay suggested that I add this Polish novel written
for young adults in which one of the characters is an amateur
mathematician attempting to prove Fermat's Last Theorem.
Note... (more) |
|
|
A Szirakuzai Óriás [A Giant of Syracuse] (1959) |
|
| Száva István |
|
This Hungarian novelization of the life of Archimedes was brought to my attention by frequent site contributor Vijay Fafat. Unfortunately, we know very little about it. It has been republished numerous times, but not translated into English AFAIK. If you have read this book and can tell us more about it (especially its mathematical contact), please write. (more) |
|
|
A Tangled Tale (1886) |
|
| Lewis Carroll |
|
A collection of ten mathematical puzzles in story form by the famous author/mathematician Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll).
"The reason I answered 3 for "Mathematical Content" is that all the math... (more) |
|
|
Teen Patti (2010) |
|
| Leena Yadav (Director) |
|
This Bollywood film features Ben Kingsley as a math professor whose theory of probability allows him (and a team of student helpers) to win huge sums of money gambling. The plot sounds suspiciously similar... (more) |
|
|
Ten (1986) |
|
| Isaac Asimov |
|
We might argue that the particular words and symbols we use to express
mathematical concepts are not as important as the concepts themselves...and
mathematically that may well be the case. However,... (more) |
|
|
Tenet (2012) |
|
| Lorne Campbell/ Sandy Grierson |
|
Évariste Galois is one of two characters in this play, whose full title is apparently "Tenet: A True Story About the Revolutionary Politics of Telling the Truth about Truth as Edited by Someone Who is... (more) |
|
|
The Tenth Muse (2019) |
|
| Catherine Chung |
|
This wide-ranging work of historical fiction unfolds in the period from just before World War II into the 1960s, in America, Europe and Asia. In the first chapter, the narrator is already an aging mathematician... (more) |
|
|
Tetraktys (2009) |
|
| Ari Juels |
|
A thriller in which a classicist with expertise in cryptography helps to track down a Pythagorean cult that has apparently discovered the ability to factor large integers quickly and therefore can break... (more) |
|
|
The Siege Of The "Lancashire Queen" (1906) |
|
| Jack London |
|
Describes how the capture of illegal shrimp-poachers becomes a problem of triangular geometry and relative speeds of chase. In particular, the pirates, trapped on a ship, the chasing posse and the point... (more) |
|
|
The Sleepwalkers (Schlafwandler) (1931) |
|
| Hermann Broch |
|
The third part of
this trilogy contains digressions in which Broch talks about logic,
mathematical axioms, and projective geometry. According to these
digressions, the lack of style of mathematics resembles the style of
modernity.
(more) |
|
|
Le Théorème de Marguerite [Marguerite's Theorem] (2023) |
|
| Anna Novion (Writer and Director) |
|
Marguerite Hoffman is a mathematics PhD student at the prestigious École normale supérieure in Paris, but drops out after an error is found in her proof of the Riemann Hypothesis. Her math skills allow... (more) |
|
|
The Theory of (Not Quite) Everything (2023) |
|
| Kara Gnodde |
|
Mimi Brotherton is a Foley artist in London who creates sound effects for movies. There is not much mathematics in that, but three of the men in her life are mathematicians: her father, her brother, and... (more) |
|
|
The Theory of Death (2015) |
|
| Faye Kellerman |
|
The apparent suicides of a math student and math professor at Kneed Loft College are investigated by a detective, his wife, and a former detective now studying law. It was sufficiently engrossing and... (more) |
|
|
The Theory of Everything (1991) |
|
| Lisa Grunwald |
|
Theoretical physicist Alexander Simon is on the verge of making a
mathematical discovery of tremendous importance. By collapsing the hidden
dimensions in string theory to a 2-dimensional manifold, he... (more) |
|
|
Thinking of Leaving Your Husband? (2010) |
|
| Charlotte Cory |
|
[This] is the book of a series of [BBC] radio comedies from last year, in which the heroine has various unfortunate experiences with internet dating before meeting the perfect partner, who is a mathematician.... (more) |
|
|
Thirteen Diamonds (2000) |
|
| Alan Cook |
|
A murder mystery set in a retirement community in Chapel Hill, NC. During a bridge game at the club, one of the members, a Nobel-laureate in Economics, keels over and dies after receiving a perfect hand... (more) |
|
|
Thomas Gray: Philosopher Cat (1988) |
|
| Philip J. Davis |
|
As the jacket
blurb explains, the book is "a philosophical fireside tale wrapped lightly
around a mathematical problem, revealing scholarly life and attitudes at a
well-known English college. It... (more) |
|
|
The Thousand (2010) |
|
| Kevin Guilfoile |
|
Two competing Pythagorean cults (one "fundamentalist" and the other believing in "further revelations") are behind worldwide disasters such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks and hurricane Katrina in this conspiracy... (more) |
|
|
The Three Body Problem (2004) |
|
| Catherine Shaw |
|
A cleverly titled novel that uses a historical mathematical contest
and several characters based on real mathematicians as the basis for a
murder mystery. Of special interest is the novel's presentation... (more) |
|
|
Three Days and a Child (1970) |
|
| Abraham B. Yehoshua |
|
Dov, an Israeli mathematics graduate student, watches the young child of a woman he knew at a kibbutz. He alternates between loving the child as he still loves the woman and intentionally endangering... (more) |
|
|
Three Plates on the Table [Tres platos en la mesa] (1961) |
|
| José María Gironella |
|
An emotional, sensitively written example of a short story of magic realism, in the classic tradition of Borges and Cortazar. Most of the story revolves around the main character’s frame of existence,... (more) |
|
|
Tigor (aka The Snowflake Constant) (1991) |
|
| Peter Stephan Jungk |
|
In this novel, a mathematics professor is emotionally wounded to the point of temporary insanity by the lack of acceptance of his geometric theory of snowflakes and runs away. His journey takes him to... (more) |
|
|
Time Bends (The Students Tale) in The Rags of Time (2009) |
|
| Maureen Howard |
|
The poetic ramblings of an aging author confined to her New York apartment, who presumably is Maureen Howard herself, include short stories about the ongoing lives of her characters, including the math... (more) |
|
|
The Tolman Trick (2006) |
|
| Manil Suri |
|
Professor Tolman attends a conference at the Mathematics Institute at Oberwolfach, but a young colleague suspects that the result he is presenting may not be correct. Published in the first issue of Subtropics,... (more) |
|
|
Too Much Happiness (2009) |
|
| Alice Munro |
|
The penultimate collection of short stories from Nobel laureate Alice Munro features a title story about the final days of Sonia Kovalevskaya. The main source of tension in the story is her love affair... (more) |
|
|
Torn Curtain (1966) |
|
| Alfred Hitchcock (Director) |
|
Professor Armstrong (Paul Newman) pretends to defect to the other side
of the iron curtain to learn of the secret "star wars"-like defense
plan discovered by the brilliant (by his own account) Dr. Lindt.
Fiancee... (more) |
|
|
Touch (2012) |
|
| Tim Kring |
|
This TV show combines disparate familiar elements. Like "24", it has Kiefer Sutherland running around trying to save people. Like "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close" it has the autistic child of a single... (more) |
|
|
Touch-Me-Not (2010) |
|
| Cynthia Riggs |
|
In this installment of a series of mystery novels set on Martha's Vineyard, an electrician accidentally murders an employee who was blackmailing him and then is killed himself. Throughout most of the... (more) |
|
|
Towel Season (1998) |
|
| Ron Carlson |
|
A mathematician and his wife try to fit in with their suburban
neighbors. Perhaps the best description of the feel of what doing
mathematical research is really like. Much of the tension of the... (more) |
|
|
The Trachtenberg Speed System (2014) |
|
| Buzz Mauro |
|
Realizing that he is likely to die there, Jakow Trachtenberg fantasizes that the method of mental computation that he has created while at a Nazi concentration camp will live on beyond him. A young guard... (more) |
|
|
Tracking the Random Variable (1991) |
|
| Marcos Donnelly |
|
Ronald Barr is a statistician with a knack for identifying hidden variables. For example, it was he who recognized that by offering chicken soup and hot chocolate in the automatic coffee machine, his... (more) |
|
|
Train Brains / The Runaway Train (Donald Duck) (1956) |
|
| Carl Barks |
|
Donald Duck's nephews -- Huey, Dewey and Louie -- are trying to earn a merit badge in engineering for the Junior Woodchucks by working out a complicated problem involving toy trains.
"We'll never be... (more) |
|
|
Travelling Salesman (2012) |
|
| Andy Lanzone (writer) / Timothy Lanzone (director and writer) |
|
This film is a low-budget intellectual thriller about a Fields Medalist who, while working for the NSA, helps to prove that P=NP and takes part in the deliberations to decide what to do with it. "Travelling... (more) |
|
|
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) |
|
| Betty Smith |
|
You may be surprised to see Betty Smith's novel about a girl growing up poor in the early 20th century on this list. In fact, it is a stretch to call this "mathematical fiction". However, the little... (more) |
|
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The Triangular House [La Casa Triangular] (1925) |
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| Ramon Gomez de la Serna |
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Adolfo Sureda had made a lasting promise to himself: to have a house of unique architecture built for him and his bride, Remedios.
For this, he commissioned a recent graduate of architecture who... (more) |
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Trueman Bradley: Aspie Detective (2012) |
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| Alexei Maxim Russell |
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Trueman Bradley moves from a small midwestern town to New York City to establish himself as a private detective. At first people try to discourage him as he seems highly unqualified. Not only has he... (more) |
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Turbulence (2010) |
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| Giles Foden |
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A British meteorologist is stationed in Scotland during World War II not to simply run a weather station (which is his cover), but to get to know the brilliant Wallace Ryman and learn to use his mathematical... (more) |
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The Turing Enigma (2011) |
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| Peter Wild (Screenwriter and Director) |
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Maths professor Jonah Block finds himself in possession of a 50 year old postcard from Alan Turing over which people have been killed. He quickly realizes it is the (literal) key to decoding a series... (more) |
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Turing's Delirium (2007) |
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| Edmundo Paz Soldan |
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This is a hacker-counter-hacker story set in Bolivia, where the newly resurrected president hires an NSA official to set up the country's counter-espionage / cyber-security unit ("Black Chamber"). The... (more) |
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Twenty-seven Uses for Imaginary Numbers (2009) |
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| Buzz Mauro |
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A teenage boy's discovery of the joys of Euler's formula coincides with the awakening of his homosexual desires. The author's mathematical understanding is very good, and the story reminded me of young... (more) |
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Twisted (2004) |
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| Jonathan Kellerman |
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One of the main characters is a graduate student pursing a Ph.D. in biostatistics, who notes to police detectives that coincidences in the circumstances of several murders are statistically significant,... (more) |
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The Twisted Heart (2009) |
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| Rebecca Gowers |
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An English graduate student solves a 19th century murder mystery involving Charles Dickens with the help of her boyfriend, a mathematician.
This book is not yet available in the US and so I have not... (more) |
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Twisted Seduction (2010) |
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| Dominique Adams (writer and director) |
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A man with a PhD in mathematics and a master's degree in psychology kidnaps a woman he has determined mathematically and scientifically to be an ideal match for him, with the intention of forcing her to... (more) |
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Two Moons (2000) |
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| Thomas Mallon |
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A historical novel set in Washington DC of the late 19th century in which
astronomers and the Naval Observatory (aided by the "computer" Cynthia May)
deal with scientific and political matters of the... (more) |
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Two Trains Running (1990) |
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| August Wilson |
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This play is set in Pittsburgh, 1969. An economically depressed area
of the city is facing urban renewal, and the specter of eminent domain
seizure hangs over the main character's future. The other... (more) |
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Ultima Dea [The Last Goddess] (1994) |
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| Gianni Riotta |
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Unfortunately this book does not appear to have been
translated from the original Italian. One of the central
characters in the book, Alfred Diognetus (described as a
"saint mathematician") is the... (more) |
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Ultima lezione a Gottinga [Last lecture at Göttingen] (2009) |
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| Davide Osenda |
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This beautifully illustrated comic book presents a professor's last lecture to a (nearly) empty auditorium as the Nazi's begin to gather the city's Jews outside. It is perhaps a stretch to call this "fiction";... (more) |
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The Ultimate Prime (2001) |
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| Tom Petsinis |
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A story narrated in second person about a youth with autism whose only interest is mathematics.
Since "you" are the protagonist in this story, it puts the reader inside the mind of an individual who... (more) |
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Uncle Georg's Attic (2002) |
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| Ben Schumacher |
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This short story appeared in the September 2002 issue of "Math Horizons",
published by the Mathematical Association of America. In it, some kids
look through an attic containing lots of stuff belonging... (more) |
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Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture (1992) |
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| Apostolos Doxiadis |
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This novel, recently (2000) translated from Greek, follows the attempts of
fictional mathematician Petros Papachristos to prove Goldbach's
Conjecture (that every even number greater than two is the sum... (more) |
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Uniform Convergence: A One-Woman Play (2016) |
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| Corrine Yap |
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This play about race, gender and math was written and first performed by Corrine Yap when she was a math/theater double major at Sarah Lawrence College. It has evolved and changed and continued to be... (more) |
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A Universe of Sufficient Size (2019) |
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| Miriam Sved |
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It is only after the death of her father that an Australian sculptor learns that her mother was one of five Hungarian Jews mathematicians who worked on math research together in a public park as Hitler... (more) |
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Universe of Two (2020) |
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| Stephen P. Kiernan |
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A novel about a mathematician who works on the Manhattan Project, focusing primarily on his ethical dilemma and his romance with an organist (who narrates every other chapter). The protagonist, Charlie... (more) |
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The Unknown Quantity (1933) |
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| Hermann Broch |
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"Here the main character is a
mathematician who learns, through love and tragedy, that the `unknown
quantity' of life resists mathematical formulation."
(more) |
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The Unknowns: A Mystery (2009) |
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| Benedict Carey |
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A novel for middle school children which aims to teach mathematical concepts as the young protagonists try to solve the mystery of the disappearances in their neighborhood.
I thoroughly enjoyed the... (more) |
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Unlocked (2012) |
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| Courtney Milan |
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In this novella the heroine's mother is an amateur astronomer computing the orbit of a comet. She has no recognition from professional astronomers. She is invited by her fellow upper class ladies... (more) |
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Until Tomorrow, Then (2010) |
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| Shaun Hamill (writer and director) |
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A short film about a young mathematician obsessed with working out the "rate the universe is running down" so that he can determine time that the universe will end.
One of the two other characters... (more) |
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The Use of Geometry in the Modern Novel (1956) |
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| Norman Clarke |
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A slightly humorous short story written as a “how to?” piece. The author asks if a story can be written to reflect a geometrical theorem,
“translating this meager framework into a well piece... (more) |
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V2: A Novel of World War II (2020) |
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| Robert Harris |
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The plot of this work of historical fiction is based on the following historical fact: A team of British WAAFs stationed in Belgium used mathematics and slide rules to try to determine the location of... (more) |
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The Valley of Fear (1916) |
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| Sir Arthur Conan Doyle |
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Having introduced Sherlock Holmes' most famous enemy, Professor
Moriarty, as a mathematician in an earlier
story, Doyle provides us with just a small glimpse of his
mathematical genius (as opposed to... (more) |
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Verrechnet (2009) |
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| Carl Djerassi/Isabella Gregor |
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With the help of playwright/director Isabella Gregor, Djerassi updated his play Calculus (Newton's Whores). The plot still revolves around the question of priority on the invention of calculus, and especially... (more) |
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Very in Pieces (2015) |
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| Megan Frazer Blakemore |
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A coming-of-age novel for young adults about a mathematically talented girl named Very Sayles-Woodruff who has trouble fitting in with her family of painters and poets. In one subplot, a teacher has put... (more) |
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A Very Peculiar Practice (1986) |
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| Andrew Davies |
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In this television series about a medical doctor at a British university, a recurring character during the first season was a mathematician who was the doctor's roommate, Chen. Their "flat" was therefore... (more) |
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Victoria Martin: Math Team Queen (2007) |
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| Kathryn Walat (playwright) |
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Victoria Martin is a popular girl at Longwood High -- dating one of the stars of the school basketball team and friends with the "Jens" on the cheerleading squad. So, most of the guys on the math team... (more) |
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Villages (2004) |
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| John Updike |
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The protagonist of this novel is Owen Mackenzie, a character who earned a degree in mathematics in the 1950's and went on to work with computers. His first lover, as well, was a mathematician. They... (more) |
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Vineland (1990) |
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| Thomas Pynchon |
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This novel is Pynchon's bittersweet look at the idealism of the sixties
as seen from the cynicism of the eighties. One key character from the
sixties is the mathematician Weed Atman, first seen studying... (more) |
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The Visiting Professor (1994) |
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| Robert Littell |
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Lemuel Falk, a ``randomnist'' from the Steklov Institute in Russia
gets a visiting position at a chaos research institute in Upstate New
York in this academic farce. He meets a drunkard who studies... (more) |
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Waiting for Citizen Gödel (2005) |
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| Howard V. Hendrix |
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Short story revolving around Godel's application for US citizenship. There is a well-known episode from Godel's life, where Einstein and Oscar Morgenstern took Godel for his citizenship oath. Godel,... (more) |
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War and Peace (1869) |
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| Lev Tolstoy |
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Tolstoy's famous novel about...well, about war and peace (!) contains long passages explaining an analogy he makes between history and calculus. In particular, he argues that we should view history as... (more) |
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Watt (1953) |
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| Samuel Beckett |
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WATT is generally considered a very strange novel, written
in a style best described as "permutational". The narrator
and many of the characters frequently find themselves unable
... (more) |
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The Weight of Numbers (2006) |
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| Simon Ings |
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This is an ambitious novel which attempts to be as overwhelming as Pynchon, to deconstruct what it means to be human like Vonnegut and to tie together bits of history like Forrest Gump. For a few readers,... (more) |
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Welcome to Paradise (2005) |
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| Paul David-Goddard /Helen Miller |
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Not much happens in this play. A young Englishman who has just earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics goes on a trip to Australia to find himself. Co-author Helen Miller based the play on her... (more) |
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What Are the Odds? (2006) |
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| Justin Spitzer (writer) / Matthew Tritt (director) |
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Two extremely nerdy strangers who keep running into each other in New York City are surprised to learn that they both "study applied mathematics" and are attending the same conference on "stochastic processes... (more) |
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What the Revolution Requires (2020) |
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| Timons Esaias |
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A minimalist short story in which an author seeks to write a ground breaking work of mathematical fiction:
Raymond had several plotlines laid out, all their steps organized and ready. He intended to... (more) |
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What the Tortoise Said to Achilles (1895) |
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| Lewis Carroll |
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A very short dialogue-story, where the Tortoise teaches Achilles that in the strictest sense of Logic, the process of inference from even 2 propositions to an almost automatically-implied third proposition... (more) |
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Who Killed Professor X? (2010) |
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| Thodoris Andriopoulos / Thanasis Gkiokas |
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The famous mathematician Professor X (not to be confused with Charles Xavier) is found dead before his presentation to the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1900, and this graphic novel puts... (more) |
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Who Killed the Duke of Densmore? (1994) |
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| Claude Berge |
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The murder mystery in the title took
place many years ago and the only witnesses are a group of women who each
visited the crime scene for a single stretch of time. They each remember
whom they met... (more) |
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Whom the gods love: The story of Evariste Galois (1948) |
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| Leopold Infeld |
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A fictionalized biography of the ill-fated originator of group theory written by
a collaborator of Einstein (better known today for his joint work with Max Born on electrodynamics).
“No professor... (more) |
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The Wild Numbers (1998) |
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| Philibert Schogt |
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Most mathematicians dream of proving a terribly important result. In
this novel, mathematician Isaac Swift
thinks he has done just that: solved "Beauregard's Wild Number
Problem". But is his proof... (more) |
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The Witch of Agnesi (2006) |
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| Robert Spiller |
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Solid murder mystery in which a high school math teacher finds the murderer of three of her best students.
My favorite thing about this book is the way that Bonnie Pinkwater and her boyfriend -- the... (more) |
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Without a Trace (Episode: Claus and Effect) (2007) |
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| David Amann (writer) / Alicia Kirk (writer) / Bobby Roth (Director) |
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In this Christmas special episode of the TV crime drama, a department store Santa turns out to be a mathematical prodigy who has quit his job as a mathematician/programmer due to ethical concerns that his work will cause others to lose their jobs. He becomes involved in a scheme to make money by applying mathematics to gambling.
(more) |
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The Wizard (1989) |
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| C.S. Godshalk |
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A mathematically talented youth in a bad neighborhood becomes a drug dealer and may not be able to take advantage of his genius by attending the private school which has offered him a scholarship.
In... (more) |
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The Wonderful Dog Suit (1964) |
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| Donald Hall |
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I have to say this very short story (published in The Carleton’s Miscellany in Spring 1964) merges magic realism and horror quite effortlessly with child-like humor so that by the end of it, you are... (more) |
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The World as I Found It (1987) |
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| Bruce Duffy |
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A fictionalized "biography" of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein
including a portrayal of Bertrand Russell.
"Very enjoyable, but barely scratches the surface of Wittgenstein's life,
work, and character... (more) |
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The Wright 3 (2006) |
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| Blue Balliet |
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This is the second mystery book with Calder, Petra and Tommy, where the events take place after those in “Chasing Vermeer”. The main theme in the book is the impending destruction / tear-down... (more) |
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X+Y (A Brilliant Young Mind) (2014) |
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| Morgan Matthews (Director) / James Graham (Writer) |
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An autistic teenager learns to deal with the death of his father and his first romance as he represents Britain in the International Mathematical Olympiad.
This film is very loosely based on the story... (more) |
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Year of the Rat (2009) |
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| Kristine Kathryn Rusch |
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A story of two brothers who
use mathematics, one to prove, one to disprove God, and fortunately have
their big sister to resolve things.
One of two mathematical stories in Denise Little's anthology Intelligent Design. (See also Luck be a Lady).
(more) |
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The Year of the Tiger (1996) |
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| Jack Higgins |
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Cold war spy thriller in which our hero must help an aged Soviet
mathematician escape to our side of the Iron Curtain. (I haven't read the
book, just some reviews, so if there is more to say about it... (more) |
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The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) |
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| Kim Stanley Robinson |
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This alternative history is based on the assumption that the Great Plague
of the 1300s that decimated Europe's population was much worse, and that
it in fact led to the extinction of almost all of... (more) |
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Yi ge dou bu neng shao (1999) |
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| Yimou Zhang (director) / Xiangsheng Shi (screenplay) |
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A 13 year-old-girl is given the job of being the teacher for a remote Chinese village for one month and promised extra pay if she does not lose a single student. When one student's mother becomes ill,... (more) |
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Young Archimedes (1924) |
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| Aldous Huxley |
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A couple vacationing in Italy meet a peasant boy with strong
mathematical abilities. The most mathematical portion of the text is
a discussion of a proof of the Pythagorean theorem which the boy
develops.... (more) |
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The Young Mathematician (1832) |
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| Anonymous |
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A very light-weight story about a sixteen-year old girl, Laura (daughter of one Mr. Sinclair), who did not like mathematics. As she and her mother spoke one day:
‘Oh, mother,’ she exclaimed,... (more) |
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The Young Philosopher - A Sketch For Parents (1852) |
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| Sylvanus Cobb, Jr.. |
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Another short story which highlights the prejudices the society had toward the measure of “intelligence” and the inability to recognize the large range of human abilities at a young age, where the... (more) |
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Zero (2009) |
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| Buzz Mauro |
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An awkward, middle-aged math teacher stumbles (quite literally) into a sexual relationship with an unusual young woman.
The character occasionally thinks in mathematical terms. Towards the beginning,... (more) |
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The Zero Clue (1952) |
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| Rex Stout |
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Nero Wolfe can't stand Leo Heller, a mathematician who uses operations research to solve mysteries and seems to be superseding Wolfe's own reputation. But then Heller is murdered by one of his clients.... (more) |
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Zéro, ou les Cinq vies d'Aemer (2005) |
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| Denis Guedj |
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This novel traces the history of the number `zero' through the lives of five different women, living in five different eras, but all living in the same place: Mesopotamia/Iraq.
Guedj is already known... (more) |
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Zilkowski's Theorem (2003) |
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| Karl Iagnemma |
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This is a story of a love triangle with a definite mathematical twist. Henderson's roommate, Czogloz, steals away his girlfriend, Milla, when all three were math graduate students. Years later, seeking... (more) |
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