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Axiom of Dreams (2023) |
 | Arula Ratnakar |
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An aspiring mathematician gets a brain implant designed to aid her research on Gödel Incompleteness in the hopes that it will help her get accepted into a PhD program. But, against the advice of... (more) |
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Battle of the Frog and the Mouse (1984) |
 | John Hays |
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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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Breaking the Code (1986) |
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| Hugh Whitemore (playwright) |
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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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Calculus of Murder (1986) |
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| Erik Rosenthal |
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"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) |
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Continuums (2008) |
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| Robert Carr |
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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) |
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Cryptonomicon (1998) |
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| Neal Stephenson |
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This "cult" novel of mathematics, computer science, espionage and
warfare follows a mathematician through World War II and his grandson
through the creation of a (less than ordinary) silicon valley start-up
company.... (more) |
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Division by Zero (1991) |
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| Ted Chiang |
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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) |
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Domaine [Domain] (2009) |
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| Patric Chiha (screenplay and director) |
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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) |
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The Einstein Enigma (2010) |
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| José Rodrigues Dos Santos |
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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) |
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En busca de Klingsor (In Search of Klingsor) (1999) |
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| Jorge Volpi |
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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) |
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Euclid Alone (1975) |
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| William F. Orr |
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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) |
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The Face of the Waters (1991) |
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| Robert Silverberg |
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The novel is set on a water-logged planet called “Hydros”, populated by artificial islands floating on a planet-spanning ocean. A few humans on one of the islands end up offending the local... (more) |
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Gödel's Doom (1985) |
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| George Zebrowski |
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What if Gödel was wrong? That is the question asked in this well
written but very confused short story. The characters in this story
decide to test Gödel's theorem by running a computer
program... (more) |
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Gödel geht [Gödel's Exit] (1991) |
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| Andreas Findig |
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Kurt Gödel's reflection steps out of the mirror and joins him at his table in a cafe. (That may seem weird, but the author assures us that such fantastical things are always happening in Vienna.) Since... (more) |
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Gödel Incomplete (2013) |
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| Martha Goddard (Writer and Director) |
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A 21st century physicist repeatedly travels back in time for short visits to the 20th century as a result of her experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. For completely unexplained reasons, she always... (more) |
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Gödel Numbers (1969) |
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| J.W. Swanson |
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The story revolves around an ancient stone artifact found near Cairo which has engraved markings of slanted lines. In an incredible non-sequitor, one of the characters in the story guesses that the numbers... (more) |
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Gödel's Sunflowers (1992) |
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| Stephen Baxter |
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Far in the future, a human explores a giant fractal construction which is a
physical realization of the total knowledge of the creatures which created
it long ago. In the process he learns about (more) |
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Herbrand's Conjecture and the White Sox Scandal (1993) |
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| Eliot Fintushel |
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Hi, I'm Eliot Fintushel, the author of HERBRAND'S CONJECTURE AND THE WHITE
SOX SCANDAL. The idea is that the mathematical logician Jacques Herbrand
who actually did die in a mountaineering accident... (more) |
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Incomplete Proofs (2012) |
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| John Chu |
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This unusual piece combines equal parts fashion industry and math research, with a dash of fantasy and just a pinch of homo-eroticism. Grant does a favor for his old partner, Duncan, by modeling his new... (more) |
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Incompleteness (2004) |
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| Apostolos Doxiadis |
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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) |
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Infinities (2010) |
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| Vandana Singh |
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A nicely written story about Abdul Karim, a mathematics teacher at the local municipal school, set against the backdrop of the religious turmoil between Hindus and Muslims in India. I couldn't quite... (more) |
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Instantiation (2019) |
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| Greg Egan |
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In this sequel to 3-adica, the conscious video game characters plan an escape that feels like a cross between Mission Impossible and Inception, but with the addition of famous mathematicians sitting around... (more) |
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Journey into a Dark Heart (1998) |
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| Peter Hoeg |
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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) |
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Letters From Incompleteness (2021) |
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| Jonah Howell |
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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) |
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The Logic Pool (1997) |
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| Stephen Baxter |
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The Logic Pool deals with an intelligence that is similar
to the meme-minds in Gregory Benford's Foundations Fear.
Meme-mind -- I think this means some sort of intelligence whose
existence arises... (more) |
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Logicomix (2008) |
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| Apostolos Doxiadis / Christos Papadimitriou |
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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) |
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Lucy and David and the God Equation (2011) |
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| Alan McKenzie |
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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) |
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Midtown Pythagoras (2007) |
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| Michael Brodsky |
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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) |
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The N-Plus-1th-Degree (1968) |
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| Stephen Barr |
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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) |
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Oracle (2000) |
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| Greg Egan |
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The protagonist, Robert Stoney is a british mathematician who worked on German codes during WW II, was greatly affected by the death of a close friend, and was later persecuted for his homosexuality. ... (more) |
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The Oxford Murders (2004) |
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| Guillermo Martinez |
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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) |
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Paradox (2000) |
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| John Meaney |
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Young Tom Corcorigan seems to represent the lowest "caste" in the extremely hierarchical human society of the year 3404. However, his mathematical abilities (he is able to figure out a way around Gödel's... (more) |
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PopCo (2004) |
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| Scarlett Thomas |
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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) |
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Pythagorean Crimes (2006) |
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| Tefcros Michaelides |
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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) |
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Q.E.D. (1984) |
|
| Bruce Stanley Burdick |
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The "Q.E.D." from the title of this short story published in Analog
(volume 104 #12, December 1984, pp. 96-112) is the latin expression "quod
erat demonstratum" that is meant to conclude a proof and... (more) |
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The Shackles of Conviction (2008) |
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| James R. Meyer |
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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) |
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The Square Root of Summer (2016) |
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| Harriet Reuter Hapgood |
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In this young adult novel, a mathematically inclined teenager who ignores the sad events she does not want to remember learns to deal with them by literally revisiting her past through wormholes.
There... (more) |
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The Time Ships (1995) |
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| Stephen Baxter |
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This sequel to H.G. Wells' classic "The Time Machine" updates the story with some quantum mechanics and general relativity that were not available to Wells in 1895.
Our narrator returns to the distant... (more) |
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Timescape (1979) |
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| Gregory Benford |
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On the positive side, we have a clever idea that shows some of the flavor of
modern mathematical physics, some positive comments about mathematics and
mathematical name-dropping, and even some mathematical... (more) |
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Turing (A Novel About Computation) (2003) |
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| Christos Papadimitriou |
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The four vertices of an unlikely love "rectangle" are (a) a dying, maverick cryptographer, (b) a pregnant Internet wiz, (c) a romantic middle-aged Greek archaeologist and (d) Turing, an artificially intelligent... (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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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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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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What Happened at Cambridge IV (1990) |
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| David Langford |
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This is another BLIT story by David Langford; this time, a brilliant mathematician working on a neuro-mathematical model of the brain finds a type of visual input that doesn't just slow it down but causes... (more) |
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White Rabbit, Red Wolf [This Story is a Lie] (2018) |
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| Tom Pollock |
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Seventeen-year-old Peter Blankman is afraid of most things, but he loves his mother (a famous research psychologist), his twin sister (a tough girl who looks out for him), and math. So, he is in trouble... (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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