 |
21 Grams (2003) |
 | Alejandro González Iñárritu |
|
I have not yet seen this film in which Sean Penn portrays a critically ill mathematician. The title is apparently taken from the results of the bizarre (hard to believe and never reproduced) experiments... (more) |
|
 |
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Ah of Life (2010) |
|
| Banks Helfrich (Writer and Director) |
|
At the beginning of this film we see various stages in the life of Nigel. We see him as a high school student about to fail math due to lack of interest in the subject. We see him as an old man who enjoys... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Arcadia (2016) |
|
| Iain Pears |
|
As this clever novel is intentionally a hodge-podge of genres, it is a bit difficult to describe. It involves a British spy brought back from retirement in the 1960s to find a mole, a mathematician in... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Atrocity Archives (2004) |
|
| Charles Stross |
|
"The Laundry" is a British spy organization which is responsible for suppressing certain dangerous math research. The occult implications of mathematics became clear with Alan Turing's paper "Phase Conjugate... (more) |
|
|
Aurora in Four Voices (1998) |
|
| Catherine Asaro |
|
Jato is trapped in Nightingale, a city in permanent
darkness, inhabited by mathematical artists who mostly ignore him. Soz
arrives to repair her ship, meets Jato, and finds... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Axiom of Choice (2011) |
|
| David W. Goldman |
|
A ``choose-your-own-adventure'' story about a guitarist who must face the consequences of his decision to take a plane ride that ended in disaster. A brief but very nice discussion of The Axiom of Choice... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Barr’s Problem (1892) |
|
| Julian Hawthorne |
|
A cute, tall-tale about one Professor Brooks - presumably one of mathematics - his past student, Barr, and his 19-year old niece, Susan Wayne. The two youngsters are in love with each other but the... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Bellwether (1996) |
|
| Connie Willis |
|
A statistician studying the causes of fads and a chaos theorist studying the behavior of animals write a joint grant proposal for a project involving sheep. That may not sound like a winning book summary,... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Bones of Time (1996) |
|
| Kathleen Ann Goonan |
|
A young 21st century mathematician named Cen (short for Century) Kalakaua falls in love with a 19th century Hawaiian princess when they meet through an unusual temporal phenomenon. He becomes obsessed... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Bonnie's Story: A Blonde's Guide to Mathematics (2013) |
|
| Janis Hill |
|
Bonnie wakes one morning to find an unusual stranger named Rogan taking pictures of street signs near her home. Despite the apparent implications of being "a blonde", Bonnie is sufficiently well-versed... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Calculating the Speed of Heartbreak (2023) |
|
| Wendy Nikel |
|
Normally, I don't like works of mathematical fiction that use mathematical terminology and notation to discuss romantic relationships. They often involve groan-inducing formulae like "Pat + Sandy = Love".
However,... (more) |
|
|
Calculus and Pizza (2003) |
|
| Clifford Pickover |
|
A pizza chef teaches calculus to his restaurant patrons. Romance and hilarity ensue.
(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 Captured Cross-Section (1929) |
|
| Miles J. Breuer (M.D.) |
|
Another "extra dimensions" story, with the twist of our hero having to save his fiance (also a mathematician) from terrifying dangers. There is some nonsense at the beginning about rotations and a count... (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) |
|
|
Catch the Lightning [Lightning Strikes Vols. I-II] (1997) |
|
| Catherine Asaro |
|
A 17 year-old girl from Los Angeles finds herself in a sexual/romantic relationship with a not-quite-human time-traveller in this book which continues the author's "Skolian saga".
The story is actually... (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Conceiving Ada (1997) |
|
| Lynn Hershman-Leeson
|
|
Bizarre, low-budget film in which a female computer programmer from the 20th century accesses the memories of Ada Lovelace, the 19th century mathematician and daughter of the poet Lord Byron. The film... (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) |
|
|
Count to a Trillion (2011) |
|
| John C. Wright |
|
A team of the world's top mathematicians is sent to examine an alien artifact which seems to have a tremendous amount of knowledge "written" on it. (I've put "written" in quotes because not only is the... (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) |
|
|
Coyote Moon (2003) |
|
| John A. Miller |
|
Well, this book is hard to describe! It's certainly different and not easily categorizable. It is a novel that addresses the question "What if a young, nerdy, MIT mathematics professor died of cancer... (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 Crazy Mathematician (1964) |
|
| Ralph Sylvester Underwood |
|
Prof. Rumpel, a "genius touched by madness - a world sensation in the fields of mathematics, physics, astronomy - you name it", considers matter and spacetime to be infinitely divisible. Just like there... (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) |
|
|
The Dark Lord (2005) |
|
| Patricia Simpson |
|
This fantasy/horror/romance novel features as its protagonist a young, female math professor at UC-Berkeley who gets caught up in a battle with a demon when she finds an unusual deck of tarot cards in... (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Doctor Who: The Algebra of Ice (2004) |
|
| Lloyd Rose (pseudonym of Sarah Tonyn) |
|
Lloyd Rose (pen name for Sarah Tonyn) has a “Doctor Who” book called “The Algebra of Ice”. It describes the attempted invasion of our universe by mathematical beings from another... (more) |
|
|
Doing our Babbage (1992) |
|
| Ira Slobodien |
|
The mind of 19th century mathematician Charles Babbage is brought back to life in electronic/mechanical form, becomes involved in a kinky "love rectangle" with the three scientists responsible (two women... (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) |
|
|
The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics (1963) |
|
| Norton Juster |
|
This picture book describes the love story of two geometrical
figures. It was also made into a cartoon by Chuck Jones (available on YouTube).
I have loved this book ever since my wonderful
mathematical... (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Eifelheim (2006) |
|
| Michael Flynn |
|
In this award winning science fiction novel, Tom and Sharon have a lot in common. They share an apartment, both use sophisticated mathematics in their research, and both become completely obsessed with... (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 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) |
|
|
|
|
The End of Mr. Y (2006) |
|
| Scarlett Thomas |
|
After her thesis advisor disappears, a graduate students studying "thought experiments" in science and in fiction discovers a copy of the rare (and supposedly cursed) book "The End of Mr. Y". Following... (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Eternal Wanderer (1936) |
|
| Nathan Schachner |
|
A magnificently pulpy story of one man, Cliff Haven's, struggle against the tyranny of a Martian who enslaves the inner planets of the solar system. As a punishment, Cliff is sentenced to become “the... (more) |
|
|
Evariste and Heloise (2008) |
|
| Marco Abate |
|
This contribution to the collection The Shape of Content is difficult to classify. Combining fiction and fact, essay and comic book, fantasy and philosophy, it essentially takes the form of a proposal... (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) |
|
|
Eye of the Beholder (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
Shortly after a stunning success in her research, personal tragedy forces a math professor to change careers and begin work at the NSA where her work on cryptography involves some difficult ethical decisions.... (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) |
|
|
|
|
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 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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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 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 Giant Claw (1957) |
|
| Fred F. Sears (director) |
|
Known as possibly one of the worst horror movies of the 20th century, The Giant Claw tells the story of a huge bird from an anti-matter universe who terrorizes airplane pilots (but apparently, not movie... (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 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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The God Patent (2009) |
|
| Ransom Stephens |
|
After his life falls apart, an engineer tries to revive a collaboration with the fundamentalist Christian with whom he once wrote two patents based on the Bible. While he viewed these patents for what... (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 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) |
|
|
Gödel Incomplete (2013) |
|
| Martha Goddard (Writer and Director) |
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Hollow Man (1993) |
|
| Dan Simmons |
|
A psychic mathematician is driven to the edge of insanity as his life partner approaches death. The mathematician's research is described explicitly -- as are some of the horrific events that befall... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
In Alien Flesh (1978) |
|
| Gregory Benford |
|
A human scientist discovers that the Drongheda, a whale-like alien species, do sophisticated mathematics that he can access by climbing inside an orifice and implanting electrodes inside their bodies.... (more) |
|
|
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 River (2006) |
|
| Justin Stanchfield |
|
A female mathematics professor undergoes a surgical procedure to enable her to live and communicate with aquatic aliens. Her goal is to learn to understand their mathematics well enough to reproduce their... (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells (Episode: The Truth about Pyecraft) (2001) |
|
| Chris Harrald (Script) / Clive Exton (Script) / Herbert George Wells (story) |
|
Please correct me if I'm mistaken here, but it seems that the 2001 TV miniseries The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells took the story ``The Truth about Pyecraft'', which has no math in it, and made the main... (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
|
|
The Janus Equation (1980) |
|
| Steven G. Spruill |
|
In an alternate reality where John Kennedy survived the assassination attempt and replaced all national governments with five all-powerful corporations, an award-winning mathematician tries to invent a... (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) |
|
|
The Kingdom of Ohio (2009) |
|
| Matthew Flaming |
|
Cheri-Anne Toledo, the daughter of the King of Ohio, uses her mathematical skills (and the assistance of Nikola Tesla) to build a device that is supposed to be able transport people instantaneously from... (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) |
|
|
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 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 Starship from Earth (1968) |
|
| John Boyd |
|
A mathematician named Haldane IV and a poet named Helix fall in love and try to learn the truth about the famous 19th century mathematician Fairweather I. Unfortunately, both of these things are against... (more) |
|
|
The Last Theorem (2008) |
|
| Arthur C. Clarke / Frederik Pohl |
|
Ranjit Subramanian, the protagonist in this science fiction novel, is a young Sri Lankan man who (re)discovers a short and elementary proof of Fermat's Last Theorem while enduring torture during an unjust... (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) |
|
|
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Love and a Triangle (1899) |
|
| Stanley Waterloo |
|
Julius Corbett, a man of fortune, is in love with an extraordinary woman, Nell Morrison, who is an astronomer. She has a particular penchant for Mars, an in particular, is trying to solve the problem... (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) |
|
|
Machines Like Me (2019) |
|
| Ian McEwan |
|
There are many ways to describe this book without mentioning mathematics: It is a romance between Charlie (a slacker who dabbles in day-trading) and Miranda (the law student who lives in the apartment... (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 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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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 Takes a Holiday (2001) |
|
| Paul Di Filippo |
|
Saint Hubert and Saint Barbara, the two patron saints of mathematics,
pay a visit to a devout Catholic mathematics professor who has been
praying for a mathematical miracle to silence his mockers.... (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) |
|
|
Mathematicians in Love (2006) |
|
| Rudy Rucker |
|
Together, two math grad students who are both in love with the same girl prove a theorem which characterizes all dynamical systems (from the stock market to the motion of particles) in terms of objects... (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) |
|
|
Mathematician’s Heaven (1912) |
|
| Hunter Frances |
|
An utterly trite, juvenile story which one wants to rescue only because of its long age and the fact that it was published in something as cutely named as “Tipyn O’bob” (a magazine run by students... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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 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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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, 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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Numbers Don't Lie (2005) |
|
| Terry Bisson |
|
This novel is actually just a compilation of three Wilson Wu short stories ("The Hole in the Hole", "The Edge of the Universe" and "Get Me to the Church on Time") which were previously published in Asimov's... (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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 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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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 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) |
|
|
Rapunzel's Etymology of Zero (2016) |
|
| Katie May (Writer) / Seth Podowitz (Director) |
|
[This] is a cute concept film which uses the fairy tale setting of Princess Rapunzel to articulate some simple but attractive mathematical concepts. In particular, it has a funny take on a desperate... (more) |
|
|
Reading by Numbers (2009) |
|
| Aidan Doyle |
|
Elementary number theory and some superstitious numerology underlie this story, which appeared in the November 11, 2009 issue of the online Fantasy Magazine (though I would never describe this story as... (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) |
|
|
Resistance is Futile (2015) |
|
| Jenny T. Colgan |
|
This novel begins as a familiar farce in which mathematicians are gathered by the government to decipher a message from space. However, in this case, the story soon turns into a romance between a human... (more) |
|
|
Risqueman (2009) |
|
| Mike Wood |
|
A brilliant (and beautiful) French mathematician is distressed by governmental misuse of her algorithm which accurately predicts accidents and disasters that previously were only determined probabilistically.... (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) |
|
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|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Scandal in the Fourth Dimension (1934) |
|
| Amelia Reynolds Long (as "A.R. Long") |
|
This is yet another pulp "sci-fi" story about a math professor who discovers the fourth dimension, and it barely mentions any math. However, there are two things I find interesting about it.
One is... (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Sigma Structure Symphony (2012) |
|
| Gregory Benford |
|
This story about humans in the distant future communicating with alien intelligences contains a lot of familiar ideas and some interesting new ones.
Ruth Angle is an employee at the SETI library on... (more) |
|
|
The Simplest Equation (2014) |
|
| Nicky Drayden |
|
Mariah is a Stanford University math major who has lost her interest in the subject of mathematics. She is initially annoyed when Kwalla takes the seat next to hers in class. Kwalla is an alien with... (more) |
|
|
Singer Distance (2022) |
|
| Ethan Chatagnier |
|
At the beginning of this novel, MIT math grad student Crystal Singer and a group of her friends are on a road trip to Arizona where they plan to carve a giant message to the inhabitants of Mars. Singer... (more) |
|
|
Singleton (2002) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
This story involves a physicist and a mathematician who have a child -- well, sort of -- that they have specially designed to remain in a "classical" state (as opposed to a quantum superposition of states)... (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) |
|
|
Solid Geometry (1976) |
|
| Ian McEwan |
|
This short story from McEwan's award winning first collection is about a man who becomes learns some topology from his grandfather's journals...but not your average topology. The Victorian journals include... (more) |
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|
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Spacetime Pool (2008) |
|
| Catherine Asaro |
|
Janelle, recently graduated from MIT with a degree in math, is pulled through the "branch cut" between two universes to an alternate Earth where two sword wielding brothers rule half the world. There,... (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) |
|
|
The Square Root of Summer (2016) |
|
| Harriet Reuter Hapgood |
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Strange Attractors (1990) |
|
| William Sleator |
|
Time-travel story for young adolescents with a little bit of chaotic
dynamical systems thrown in. The plot follows Max, a high school student
with an interest in math and science, as he becomes involved... (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Sword Game (1968) |
|
| H.H. Hollis |
|
A topologist manages to create a time-smeared tesseract whose interior moves extremely slowly through time (from our perspecctive) while the exterior moves at the normal pace. He uses the tesseract to... (more) |
|
|
The Tachypomp (1873) |
|
| Edward Page Mitchell |
|
I can't believe this story is as old as it is! First published in
Scribner's Magazine in 1873, it is only dated by its sexism and its
contradition of Einstein. In order to win the hand of the beautiful
Abscissa... (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Threshold (1997) |
|
| Sara Douglass |
|
This is another fantasy book in which mathematics is seen as a sort of magic, but in this one it is specifically a particularly evil, cold and inhuman form of magic, in contrast to other less formulaic... (more) |
|
|
Time Travel for Love and Profit (2021) |
|
| Sarah Lariviere |
|
Nephele Weather's nerdy tendencies made her an outcast at school. Since her "only superpower is math", she decides to discover the equations of time travel so that she can repeat her freshman year and... (more) |
|
|
To Walk the Night (1937) |
|
| William Sloane |
|
A beautifully written horror tale in which vague references to equations are used to explain the mysterious death of a researcher who believed he proved Einstein wrong and the subsequent suicide of his colleague. The book is narrated in a quaintly old-fashioned style by the colleague's best friend and a key character is the lovely but apparently inhuman woman who was married to each victim. (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Triangular House [La Casa Triangular] (1925) |
|
| Ramon Gomez de la Serna |
|
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) |
|
|
Turbulence (2010) |
|
| Giles Foden |
|
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) |
|
|
Turing (A Novel About Computation) (2003) |
|
| Christos Papadimitriou |
|
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) |
|
|
Twenty-seven Uses for Imaginary Numbers (2009) |
|
| Buzz Mauro |
|
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) |
|
|
The Twisted Heart (2009) |
|
| Rebecca Gowers |
|
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) |
|
|
Twisted Seduction (2010) |
|
| Dominique Adams (writer and director) |
|
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) |
|
|
Two Moons (2000) |
|
| Thomas Mallon |
|
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) |
|
|
Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture (1992) |
|
| Apostolos Doxiadis |
|
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) |
|
|
A Universe of Sufficient Size (2019) |
|
| Miriam Sved |
|
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) |
|
|
Universe of Two (2020) |
|
| Stephen P. Kiernan |
|
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) |
|
|
Until Tomorrow, Then (2010) |
|
| Shaun Hamill (writer and director) |
|
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) |
|
|
The Use of Geometry in the Modern Novel (1956) |
|
| Norman Clarke |
|
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) |
|
|
Verrechnet (2009) |
|
| Carl Djerassi/Isabella Gregor |
|
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) |
|
|
Victoria Martin: Math Team Queen (2007) |
|
| Kathryn Walat (playwright) |
|
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) |
|
|
Villages (2004) |
|
| John Updike |
|
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) |
|
|
The Visiting Professor (1994) |
|
| Robert Littell |
|
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) |
|
|
The Weight of Numbers (2006) |
|
| Simon Ings |
|
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) |
|
|
What Are the Odds? (2006) |
|
| Justin Spitzer (writer) / Matthew Tritt (director) |
|
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) |
|
|
Whom the gods love: The story of Evariste Galois (1948) |
|
| Leopold Infeld |
|
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) |
|
|
The Wild Numbers (1998) |
|
| Philibert Schogt |
|
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) |
|
|
The Witch of Agnesi (2006) |
|
| Robert Spiller |
|
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) |
|
|
The Woman in Schrödinger's Wave Equations (2005) |
|
| Eugene Mirabelli |
|
The artist girlfriend of a grad student working in theoretical physics becomes interested in determining something about the mysterious woman with whom Erwin Schrödinger supposedly had an extra-marital... (more) |
|
|
The Woman Who Shook the World-Tree (2012) |
|
| Michael Swanwick |
|
A mathematical prodigy (she derived her own version of calculus to compute volumes when she was only seven years old, and by age 18 she had three PhD.s, including one in a field she had invented) teams... (more) |
|
|
The Writing on the Wall (2005) |
|
| Steve Stanton |
|
When he was eight years old, David was visited by an image of his future self, causing him to write mathematical formulas on the wall. (Unfortunately, his parents paint over it before he has a chance... (more) |
|
|
X+Y (A Brilliant Young Mind) (2014) |
|
| Morgan Matthews (Director) / James Graham (Writer) |
|
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) |
|
|
The Year of the Jackpot (1952) |
|
| Robert A. Heinlein |
|
A statistician notices trends in everything from war and famine to women unexpectedly stripping off their clothes in public. He concludes that the year 1954 is going to be an exceptionally bad year. ... (more) |
|
|
Yesternight (2016) |
|
| Cat Winters |
|
In this eerie thriller, a school psychologist tries to help parents of a young girl they believe is the reincarnated soul of a mathematical genius who died at the age of 19.
A psychologist fresh out... (more) |
|
|
Your Magic or Mine (2008) |
|
| Ann Macela |
|
A math professor and botany professor, who happen to be a wizard and a witch, have an academic disagreement regarding the nature of magic. They also happen to be soulmates, though neither of them likes... (more) |
|
|
Zero (2009) |
|
| Buzz Mauro |
|
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) |
|
|
Zilkowski's Theorem (2003) |
|
| Karl Iagnemma |
|
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) |
|
