 |
1 to 999 (1981) |
 | Isaac Asimov |
|
When cryptologists try to break a simple code, one of the key clues is
the frequency with which letters appear. In English, the letter "a"
is one of the most frequently used letters. It is therefore... (more) |
|
 |
Ada and the Engine (2015) |
 | Lauren Gunderson |
|
For Lauren Gunderson, whose plays all seem to be about emotionally potent mathematical subjects, a study of Ada Lovelace seems like a natural choice. Born Ada Byron (the daughter of the scandalous poet... (more) |
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|
Algorithms and Nasal Structures (1998) |
|
| Lois H. Gresh |
|
This short story appears "in Aboriginal Science Fiction, Summer 1998.
CS grad student is having trouble programming sheep odors.
The story competently uses real programming terminology
(stacks, queues, etc). Includes a wee bit of trigonometry.
(more) |
|
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All Scot and Bothered (2020) |
|
| Kerrigan Byrne |
|
This is another romance novel set in the 19th century featuring a female mathematician. It features such lines as:
She had very few innate talents, but the rhythm and structure of sexual relations... (more) |
|
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The Amber Shadows (2016) |
|
| Lucy Ribchester |
|
This is another thriller set at Bletchley Park during World War II. Many of the characters are described as mathematicians and Alan Turing is mentioned occasionally, but math is definitely not the center... (more) |
|
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Antibodies (2000) |
|
| Charles Stross |
|
P vs NP is perhaps the greatest problem of theoretical computer science,
and has attracted attention of a range of mathematicians, from logic
to topology. It's one of the seven Clay Millennium Prize... (more) |
|
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As Above, So Below (2009) |
|
| Rudy Rucker |
|
An LSD of a story - in typical Rucker style - where a computer programmer working with the Mandelbrot set is visited upon by a living UFO in the form of the M-set; the UFO named Ma explains to him how... (more) |
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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) |
|
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Babbage (2008) |
|
| Claire Barker (writer-director) / Eamon Wyse (writer) |
|
A 2010 movie sponsored by the British Council and directed by Claire Barker. It is a short, 15-minute vignette, a dramatization of a fictional dinner conversation between Charles Babbage, his religious... (more) |
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Babirusa (2022) |
|
| Arula Ratnakar |
|
One can briefly summarize this story without mentioning anything about mathematics: It concerns ethically questionable experiments conducted by a company called REMedy that link people through a “dream... (more) |
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Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 (1982) |
|
| L. Ron Hubbard |
|
In the year 3000, the human race has nearly been destroyed by the Psychlos, an evil alien species who dominate thousands of planets in many universes. Although they view the few remaining humans as little... (more) |
|
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The Bed and the Bachelor (2011) |
|
| Tracy Anne Warren |
|
Although it involves cryptography and the Napoleonic wars, this novel is really more of a romance than it is historical fiction or espionage.
Sebastianne Dumont is the daughter of a French mathematician... (more) |
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BLIT (1988) |
|
| David Langford |
|
Goedelian incompleteness is encoded in graphic images that
kill viewers. A new kind of infoterrorism spreads.
Originally published in INTERZONE #25 Sept/Oct 1988.
See also a fake FAQ... (more) |
|
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Breaking the Code (1986) |
|
| Hugh Whitemore (playwright) |
|
This biography of Alan Turing is a "character study" of this
fascinating mathematician. Although we do see some mathematics (including
an especially nice description of Gödel's Theorem and its mathematical
significance)... (more) |
|
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The Cambridge Quintet (1999) |
|
| John L. Casti |
|
A group of famous historical figures, including Wittegenstein,
Schrödinger, J.B.S. Haldane, and Alan Turing meet at the home of
C.P. Snow to discuss the question of whether machines can think.
John... (more) |
|
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Cantor Trilogy (2015) |
|
| Harun Šiljak |
|
An intriguing short work of speculative fiction about a future in which nearly all mathematics research is conducted by computers. In fact, in the story, only one journal (The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics),... (more) |
|
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Case of Lies (2005) |
|
| Perri O'Shaughnessy |
|
An old, unsolved casino murder becomes mathematical when three of the witnesses turn out to have been math students using their skills to win at gambling. Quite a bit of detailed discussion of number... (more) |
|
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The Catalyst [The Strange Attractor] (1991) |
|
| Desmond Cory |
|
Mathematics professor John Dobie gets caught up in a truly mind-boggling
mystery when one of his former students, his wife's best friend, and then
his own wife wind up dead, and the police consider him to be a prime
suspect.
This is the first, my personal favorite, of the three "Professor Dobie
Mysteries" written by British author Desmond Cory. (See also "The Mask of Zeus" and " (more) |
|
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Children of Time (2015) |
|
| Adrian Tchaikovsky |
|
The first book of the Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky (which is all that I have read) heavily features mathematics. In it, a brilliant but arrogant scientist's experiment to rapidly evolve... (more) |
|
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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) |
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The Cipher (2015) |
|
| John C. Ford |
|
As he turns 18, the son of the billionaire who owns the patent on public-key encryption finds himself in several complicated situations. There is a love triangle involving both his long-time girlfriend... (more) |
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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) |
|
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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) |
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Contact (1985) |
|
| Carl Sagan |
|
This is a fantastic novel; don't skip it just because you saw the
movie. Mathematics plays an important role in the book, much more so
than in the film. In both, Ellie Arroway detects a message from... (more) |
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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) |
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Cryptology (2003) |
|
| Leonard Michaels |
|
You know how The New Yorker likes to publish vaguely bizarre short
stories that happen to take place in New York City? You know how lots of
authors who want to show a character who is afraid of "real... (more) |
|
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Cryptonomicon (1998) |
|
| Neal Stephenson |
|
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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Cyberchase (2002) |
|
| Educational Broadcasting Corporation |
|
Three kids go inside "cyberspace" to help the maternal Mother Board
fight the evil Hacker. Each episode, in addition to learning about
computers, the kids have to develop their mathematical skills to... (more) |
|
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The Cypher Bureau (2018) |
|
| Eilidh McGinness |
|
This work of historical fiction tells the story of Marian Rejewski, a Polish mathematician who used algebraic methods to break the Nazi Enigma code before the beginning of World War II. Most of the book... (more) |
|
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The Da Vinci Code (2003) |
|
| Dan Brown |
|
The last act of a dying curator at the Louvre is an attempt to pass on, in code, a secret that he did not want to take to the grave. Among the things needed to "decode" this secret message is a recognition... (more) |
|
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Dark as Day (2002) |
|
| Charles Sheffield |
|
Alex Ligon, though unbelievably rich, chooses to work voluntarily at a government
agency where his predictive models for the future of the human race (based,
he claims, on the principles of statistical... (more) |
|
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Decoded (2002) |
|
| Mai Jia |
|
This novel tells the story of Rong Jinzhen, a mathematical genius who becomes a cryptographer in Mao's secret intelligence agency.
The author, who is a well-known award-winning author in China, supposedly... (more) |
|
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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) |
|
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The Devious Weapon (1949) |
|
| M. C. Pease |
|
This is a clever game-theoretic story about a man outwitting a formidable computing machine by doing almost nothing.
Prince Kallin is the leader of the “League of Border States”, of which “the... (more) |
|
|
The Difference Engine (1991) |
|
| William Gibson / Bruce Sterling |
|
Two of the innovators of the cyberpunk novel -- famous for showing how messed up the future will be because of technology -- turn everything around and show us instead how great the past would have been... (more) |
|
|
Digital Fortress (1996) |
|
| Dan Brown |
|
In a final act of defiance, a young Japanese genius threatens to make
public his "unbreakable code" if the NSA does not confess that it has been
reading even encrypted e-mails. The heroine of the story... (more) |
|
|
The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine (2017) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
This story is funnier and less mathematical than most of Greg Egan's writing. It concerns the spontaneous evolution of artificial intelligence within the global computer network. But, rather than destroying... (more) |
|
|
Doctor Who: The Turing Test (2000) |
|
| Paul Leonard |
|
Mathematician Alan Turing appears as a primary character in this unusual Doctor Who novel, and narrates the first third of it. (The other two thirds are narrated by authors Graham Greene and Joseph Heller... (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) |
|
|
The Doors of Eden (2020) |
|
| Adrian Tchaikovsky |
|
A handful of inhabitants of Earths with different evolutionary histories find themselves either working together to save their worlds as the multi-verse collapses. The characters include a cryptid-hunting... (more) |
|
|
Double Digit (2014) |
|
| Annabel Monaghan |
|
This cleverly titled sequel to A Girl Named Digit follows the continuing adventures of a young "math whiz" whose talents make her both a weapon against and a target of terrorists. (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
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Electric (2004) |
|
| Chad Taylor |
|
Three of the characters in this novel are mathematicians. Sam is a former statistician who now works at a successful Auckland data retrieval company. Because he is attracted to the hydrodynamic equations... (more) |
|
|
Elementary (Episode: Solve for X) (2013) |
|
| Jerry Levine (director)/Jeffrey Paul King (screenplay) |
|
In this episode from the second season of Elementary featuring a modern version of Sherlock Holmes with a female Watson, the duo discover equations in invisible ink on the walls in a murdered mathematician's... (more) |
|
|
Enchantress of Numbers: A Novel of Ada Lovelace (2017) |
|
| Jennifer Chiaverini |
|
This voluminous (448 page) work of historical fiction is told in first person from the perspective of Ada Byron King (Lady Lovelace) herself. Nevertheless, as the author can count on the reader to have... (more) |
|
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Enigma (1995) |
|
| Robert Harris / Tom Stoppard |
|
In this this espionage story set in England's Bletchley Park at the height of the Second World War, Tom Jericho is a clever mathematician at the famous code breaking facility who -- either despite or because... (more) |
|
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The Expert (1999) |
|
| Lee Gruenfeld |
|
A techno-legal thriller centered on a trial over cryptographic
exportation. The chip in question uses properties of large Mersenne
primes to provide an unbreakable code. This explanation seems to... (more) |
|
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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) |
|
|
Factoring Humanity (1998) |
|
| Robert J. Sawyer |
|
There is certainly a lot of deep mathematics discussed in this `first
contact' novel, as well as a good deal of controversial physics and
psychology. Still, in the end, I did not find it especially
satisfying.... (more) |
|
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The Fall of Man In Wilmslow (2009) |
|
| David Lagercrantz |
|
Before he gained fame in the US as the Swedish author taking over the mystery series featuring the fictional heroine Lisbeth Sander, David Lagercrantz wrote this novel about the death of mathematician... (more) |
|
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False Witness (2007) |
|
| Randy D. Singer |
|
An espionage novel (with an embedded Christian religious message) about a mathematician's decryption algorithm with the potential to disrupt internet security.
(more) |
|
|
Fatous Staub (1991) |
|
| Christian Mähr |
|
This surrealistic science fiction novel about parallel worlds, computers, and the mathematics of Pierre Fatou (who laid the foundations for the theory of fractals) has appeared only in German. Since I... (more) |
|
|
The Fear Index (2011) |
|
| Robert Harris |
|
Dr. Alex Hoffmann is an anti-social billionaire whose investment firm uses what he calls "Autonomous Machine Reasoning" (AMR) to make spectacular profits based on the Volatility Index (VIX), from which... (more) |
|
|
Fifty Million Monkeys (1943) |
|
| Raymond F. Jones |
|
The story is set sometime around 12,000 AD. The use of interstellar rockets over 15 years creates a "polarization of space" which leads to a "Pioneer anomaly"-like deviations in flight paths of spacecraft.... (more) |
|
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Flame War: A Cyberthriller (1997) |
|
| Joshua Quittner / Michelle Slatalla |
|
A brilliant math professor invents a code that even the government will not be able to break. When he dies in an explosion, his daughter and the law student who (unknowingly) delivered the bomb that killed him work together to bring the killers to justice. (more) |
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|
|
Four Brands of Impossible (1964) |
|
| Norman Kagan |
|
In the futuristic 1980's, a math student graduates from multiversity and gets a job with a megacorporation which is trying to do the impossible, literally. Along with his friends (a psychologist and an... (more) |
|
|
The Fourth Quadrant (2011) |
|
| Dorothy Lumley |
|
The story has some elements of mathematics built in. A ransom note coded into a ciphered message broken up on paper in 4 quadrants, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, references to the Difference Engine.... (more) |
|
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Freemium (2021) |
|
| Louis Evans |
|
A man whose ethically questionable internet scheme made him a billionaire gets even more rich and powerful when unknown aliens provide him with factorizations of large integers and predictions of the stock... (more) |
|
|
Gödel's Doom (1985) |
|
| George Zebrowski |
|
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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|
|
Georgia on My Mind (1995) |
|
| Charles Sheffield |
|
The story has to do with Babbage's
Analytical Engine and a remote region of Antarctica (the "Georgia"
of the title). The mathematics bit, aside from Babbage, consists
of a nonlinear optimization... (more) |
|
|
Ghost Days (2013) |
|
| Ken Liu |
|
This short story begins with a very short computer program that computes the Fibonacci numbers which a young student is learning in school. The teacher is one of the human crew of a space ship and the... (more) |
|
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Go, Little Book (1972) |
|
| Isaac Asimov |
|
Combinatorics is used to break a "matchbook code".
One of the "Black Widower" mysteries written for Ellery Queen magazine.
See also these [2, 3] other BW stories. (more) |
|
|
The God Equation (2007) |
|
| Michael A.R. Co |
|
The angel Azrael is ordered to kill a Philippine mathematician who is using the Internet to create a mathematical proof of the existence of God.
In this story, Azrael is presented as a hitman who kills... (more) |
|
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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) |
|
|
The Gold-Bug (1843) |
|
| Edgar Allan Poe |
|
Not only does this very famous Poe story contain a (very little) bit of mathematics in the form of a probabilistic approach to cryptography and a geometric description of the treasure hunt on the ground... (more) |
|
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Gödel Numbers (1969) |
|
| J.W. Swanson |
|
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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Hickory Dickory Shock! The Tale of Techies (2010) |
|
| Sundip Gorai |
|
This novel, which the author tells me is a best-seller in India, is a mystery thriller whose protagonist is a young man named "210". In the first chapter, which is available for free at the book's official... (more) |
|
|
Hidden Figures (2016) |
|
| Allison Schroeder (writer) / Theodore Melfi (director and writer) |
|
Hidden Figures is a "Hollywood-ized" version of the true story of three women who worked in the "colored computers" unit at NASA's Langley Research Center. In particular, it follows Katherine (Goble)... (more) |
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The Imitation Game (2014) |
|
| Morten Tyldum (director) / Graham Moore (screenplay) |
|
This film about Alan Turing and his role in breaking the Nazi enigma code has been a critical and financial success. It has won numerous awards and brought huge crowds of people to see a movie about a... (more) |
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In The Country of the Blind (1990) |
|
| Michael Flynn |
|
Sarah Beaumont escaped from the modern American ghetto to become a successful journalist, programmer and real estate investor. However, while investigating an idea for developing her latest real estate... (more) |
|
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The Ingenious Mr. Spinola (1924) |
|
| Ernest Bramah |
|
Max Carrados is a blind amateur detective genius, quite popular in the early 20th century, but mostly forgotten since then. (Such is also the fate of E.B.'s Kai Lung fantasy stories.)
... (more) |
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Inherit the Stars (1977) |
|
| James P. Hogan |
|
50,000 old human remains are found on the moon, along with lots of
documentation. The entry point to deciphering the totally unknown
language is mathematical tables and formulae."
(more) |
|
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Into the Comet (1960) |
|
| Arthur C. Clarke |
|
When a computer malfunction prevents the crew of a spaceship from being able to determine a trajectory back to Earth, they are forced to resort to using an abacus to aid in the computation. [Note that... (more) |
|
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iPhone SE (2022) |
|
| Weike Wang |
|
Without being asked to do so, a Chinese-American woman's malfunctioning smartphone assistant begins teaching her about math, starting with the importance of the number zero and going up to solving systems... (more) |
|
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The Labyrinth Key (2004) |
|
| Howard V. Hendrix |
|
In the near future, the US and China engage in a race involving
the ultimate quantum computer and quantum cryptography. Along
the way, numerous mathematical concepts are cited and sometimes
discussed,... (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 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) |
|
|
Let's Consider Two Spherical Chickens (2016) |
|
| Tommaso Bolognesi |
|
Although it takes the form of a murder mystery, Bolognesi's "Let's Consider Two Spherical Chickens" really is more of an essay than a work of fiction. Like the other chapters from the collection in which... (more) |
|
|
The Living Equation (1934) |
|
| Nathan Schachner |
|
A mathematician invents a machine that provides abstract mathematical objects ("vectors" and "tensors") a certain reality. His goal is to allow them not to solve equations but to create new ones. However,... (more) |
|
|
Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land (2005) |
|
| John Crowley |
|
This book is made up of notes and e-mail messages from a feminist historian interspersed with chapters from a previously unknown novel by Lord Byron which she has discovered while researching his daughter,... (more) |
|
|
The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2008) |
|
| Zachary Mason |
|
The introduction to this novel is a work of pseudo-scholarship, explaining how the chapters to follow were decoded by an NSA cryptographer with the help of the author. The intro contains references to... (more) |
|
|
Lost Empire (A Sam and Remi Fargo Adventure) (2011) |
|
| Clive Cussler / Grant Blackwood |
|
When archaeological adventuring couple Remi and Sam Fargo come across an old ship's bell off the coast of Zanzibar, they discover that someone else doesn't want them to find it. Eventually, their discovery... (more) |
|
|
Lost in the Math Museum (2022) |
|
| Colin Adams |
|
Teenager Kallie, who doesn't particularly care for math, gets trapped in a math museum with her father and his friend Maria. They endure horrific dangers and meet the ghosts of famous mathematicians (as... (more) |
|
|
Lovesong of the Electric Bear (2005) |
|
| Snoo Wilson (playwright) |
|
This play about Alan Turing, told from the point of view of Porgy, his teddy bear, was produced as part of the Summer 2005 season at the Potomac Theater Project in Maryland. Turing certainly had both... (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 MANIAC (2023) |
|
| Benjamin Labatut |
|
The life of John von Neumann is the main focus of this book which (like the author's other work in this database) could easily be mistaken for a non-fictional history book. The middle portion of the book... (more) |
|
|
The Math Code (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
A friend of mine once told me that he believes that mathematicians invented intentionally confusing notations to keep others from understanding what they were saying. I'm sure this is not true. We mathematicians... (more) |
|
|
Mathematical Revelations (2021) |
|
| Helen De Cruz |
|
Like others in her culture, Priestess Kayla works on mathematical proofs and hopes to receive a message from her creator, the Supreme Mathematician :
I have never had a Mathematical Revelation in my... (more) |
|
|
Mefisto: A Novel (1986) |
|
| John Banville |
|
Although the mathematics is only discussed in this novel in the vaguest terms, it is of the greatest importance to the book. Gabriel Swan, the main character/narrator is so focused on numbers and equations... (more) |
|
|
Men at Arms (1993) |
|
| Terry Pratchett |
|
The main plot is not math-related: the Night Watch has to solve a series of mysterious murders, all while dealing with the internal tensions due to the Patrician-mandated hiring of "ethnic minorities"... (more) |
|
|
The Mentalist (Episode: 18-5-4) (2010) |
|
| Bruno Heller (writer) / Leonard Dick (writer) / Charles Beeson (director) |
|
In this episode of the series about agents from the California Bureau of Investigation, an unemployed mathematician is murdered by someone wearing a clown suit.
The victim, Noah Valiquette, was a... (more) |
|
|
Mercury Rising (1998) |
|
| Harold Becker (director) |
|
Bruce Willis is an FBI agent trying to protect an autistic child whose mathematical abilities allow him to break the government's top secret codes.
Now, it is true that some of the most frequently used... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Moriarty by Modem (1995) |
|
| Jack Nimersheim |
|
A cyberversion of Sherlock Holmes is created to track down an accidently
released cyberversion of Moriarty. The big clue involves both the binomial
theorem and binomial variables.
Published in... (more) |
|
|
Mr. Churchill's Secretary (2012) |
|
| Susan Elia MacNeal |
|
After graduating with a degree in mathematics from Wellesley, Maggie Hope plans to go on to graduate studies at MIT, but her plans change unexpectedly when a letter from England gets her instead looking... (more) |
|
|
Ms Fnd in a Lbry (1961) |
|
| Hal Draper |
|
Hal Draper took a break from his life's work of promoting Marxism,
and wrote one science fiction story. The information explosion, and
associated storage and retrieval problems, is humorously examined
in... (more) |
|
|
Murder at Queen's Landing (2021) |
|
| Andrea Penrose |
|
This is the fourth in a series of books in which romance sparks between Wrexford (a chemist) and Sloan (an artist) while they solve mysteries in Regency-era England. In this one, the mystery involves... (more) |
|
|
Murmur (2019) |
|
| Will Eaves |
|
A novel about a character whose story is clearly closely modeled on the life of Alan Turing. Like Turing, Alec Pryor is a British mathematician whose worldview is shaped by a childhood romance with a... (more) |
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The Mystery of Khufu's Tomb (1935) |
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| Talbot Mundy |
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A rapid-read, reasonably entertaining novel about the real location of the Pharaoh Khufu's (Cheops) tomb and the fabulous treasury buried therein. An old, Chinese mathematician spends decades decoding... (more) |
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The Mystic Cipher (2009) |
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| Dennis Mangrum |
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When an ex-Army Ranger finds a mysterious coded document on his farm purporting to be the key to the location of a hidden treasure, he enlists the aid of his daughter, a math student. There is stereotypical... (more) |
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The Nine Billion Names of God (1953) |
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| Arthur C. Clarke |
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As much about computers as it is about mathematics, we join two
programmers hired by a Buddhist sect seeking to find all true names of
God by exhausting a combinatorial library of possibilities.
Appears... (more) |
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No Regrets (2007) |
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| Shannon Butcher |
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This is an espionage thriller in which a cryptographer reluctantly helps the military break a mathematical code. It gets high ratings from those who enjoy this sort of cloak-and-dagger stuff. Moreover,... (more) |
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The Number of Love (The Codebreakers) (2019) |
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| Roseanna M. White |
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This novel may fall into an unlikely combination of categories (it is a wartime religious historical romance spy story that is also mathematical), but its main character is a familiar stereotype: Margot... (more) |
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Old Faithful (1934) |
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| Raymond Z. Gallun |
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An extended discussion of the use of arithmetic in setting up a two-way communication code comprises the mathematical content of this forgotten classic SF short story.
Gallun (rhymes with balloon)... (more) |
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One Under the Eight (1994) |
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| Catherine Aird |
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A creative but simple mathematical code is utilized by a criminal to secretly pass a number (one that will disable a security system) to an accomplice during a wine tasting event in this short detective... (more) |
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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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Ouroboros (1997) |
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| Geoffrey A. Landis |
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The question of whether what we call "reality" could be nothing other than a simulation run on a computer gets a mathematically sophisticated treatment in this story. In addition to a vague reference... (more) |
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The Pacifist (1966) |
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| Arthur C. Clarke |
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Clarke, one of the all-time biggest names in serious science
fiction, took time to write a series of humorous science
fiction tall tales. The stories are narrated by one Harry
... (more) |
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Palimpsest (2007) |
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| Howard V. Hendrix |
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A very short story with strong shades of Clarke's "Nine billion Names of God" and "Genesis", coupled with the general idea that our reality is a Turing machine in danger of being subverted by the Great... (more) |
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The Phantom Scientist [Le Chercher Phantôme] (2013) |
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| Robin Cousin |
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This graphic novel takes place at at "The Institute for the Study of Complex and Dynamic Systems", which facilitates interactions between researchers in different disciplines. Although none of the researchers... (more) |
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The Planck Dive (1998) |
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| Greg Egan |
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This short story describes a bizarre experiment in which researchers are cloned (quantum cloning, not the genetic kind; these researchers aren't "fleshers") and sent into a black hole. Their goal is to... (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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Progress (2005) |
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| Alex Kasman |
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The mathematics of ancient Egypt can look very strange to us today. For example, although they did not have many fractions, they did know about the number 2/3. Strangely, however, it took a page of computation... (more) |
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The Puzzling Adventures of Dr. Ecco (1988) |
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| Dennis Shasha |
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The first in a sequence of delightful books. This one offers 38 puzzles packaged very well as a collection of stories solved by Dr. Ecco. To introduce him:
“Dr. Jacob Ecco is a mathematical... (more) |
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Pythagoras Eagle & the Music of the Spheres (2003) |
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| Anne Carse Nolting |
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A very well-written, highly mathematical novel for 5th — 6th graders. Three children — Shawna, Adin and Tavia — are math aficionados and are trying to crack the Beale Ciphers, a set... (more) |
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Quarantine (1977) |
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| Arthur C. Clarke |
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For safety's sake, all organic life on the planet Earth has been
wiped out by automatic defenses. The investigator looking into
this regrettable turn of affairs in an otherwise promising species
discovers... (more) |
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Quaternia (2015) |
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| Tom Petsinis |
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Ivan, the main character in Tom Petsinis' Quaternia, is a fictional teenager who spends a lot of his time and energy on playing video games. Ivan goes beyond merely devoting so much time to this hobby... (more) |
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Quicksilver: The Baroque Cycle Volume 1 (2003) |
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| Neal Stephenson |
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This long novel from the author of Cryptonomicon does for 17th Century mathematics what that earlier novel did for the 20th century. Namely, it deifies some great historical mathematicians (this time... (more) |
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Reading by Numbers (2009) |
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| Aidan Doyle |
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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) |
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River of Gods (2006) |
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| Ian McDonald |
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A science fiction novel about artificial intelligence, politics, cellular automata, climate change and alternate universes that takes place in India of 2047. Math plays only a very small role in this... (more) |
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The Rose Acacia (1995) |
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| Ralph P. Boas, Jr. |
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"A computer makes a deal with the devil, with the
usual escape clause: if it can ask a question the devil cannot answer, the
computer gets the information for free. As the devil puts it, no logical
paradoxes,... (more) |
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The Rule of Four (2004) |
|
| Ian Caldwell / Dustin Thomason |
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There is an enigmatic book from the late 15th century called Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, written by an Italian monk, Francesco Colonna (available at gutenberg.org for download). The book chronicles the... (more) |
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Sebastian (1968) |
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| David Greene (director) |
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A film about a British mathematician trying to break the German codes during World War II. (So, add this to the growing list of works of mathematical fiction inspired by Alan Turing!) I must admit that I have not yet seen the film, but you've got to love its tagline:
We can't tell you what he does (it's an international secret) but he does it with 100 girls... and does it the best!
(more) |
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Sekret Enigmy (1979) |
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| Roman Wionczek
|
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Although Alan Turing tends to get much of the credit for breaking the Nazi "Enigma" codes during World War II, three Polish mathematicians did preliminary work that (depending on who you ask) either equally brilliant and important or even more so. This film tells their story, featuring some real acts of heroism.
(more) |
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She Spies (Episode: Message from Kassar) (2003) |
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| Vince Manze (script) / Joe Livecchi (script) / Steven Long Mitchell (script) |
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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) |
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Shooting the Sun (2004) |
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| Max Byrd |
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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) |
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Signal to Noise (1999) |
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| Eric S. Nylund |
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The protagonist in this science fiction novel, Jack Potter, is a tenure track math professor in a future where San Francisco has sunk under the ocean, all non-academic employment in the United States... (more) |
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Silas P. Cornu's Dry Calculator (1898) |
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| Henry Hering |
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A very hilarious short story about a man who wants to build a mechanical calculator to evaluate logarithms but has success building a machine that can do only addition and multiplication. On the other... (more) |
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Simple Genius (2007) |
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| David Baldacci |
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A small child with an inexplicable ability to factor large numbers threatens the security of the Western world in this political thriller from popular author Baldacci. Although it is nice to see mathematics... (more) |
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Sneakers (1992) |
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| Phil Alden Robinson (director) |
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Complex espionage story, more about computers than mathematics.
However, mathematics is clearly an underlying theme and in one scene
the mysterious mathematician Gunter Janek lectures on mathematical
aspects... (more) |
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Souls in the Great Machine (1999) |
|
| Sean McMullen |
|
A thousand years in our future, civilization on Earth has been restarted from scratch following a combination of global warming, nuclear winter, and a mysterious periodic phenomenon known as "the Call".... (more) |
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Spacetime Donuts (1981) |
|
| Rudy Rucker |
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The story is set in a chaotic setting (it's a Rucker novel!) of an all-providing-but-oppressive society. The society is controlled in large parts by a supercomputer, PhizWhiz, and its political masters.... (more) |
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Stay Close, Little Ghost (2013) |
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| Oliver Serang |
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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) |
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The Steradian Trail (2013) |
|
| M.N. Krish |
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This mathematical thriller takes place in India where American computer science professor Joshua Ezekiel is attempting to figure out the twisted criminal plot that his recently murdered student had become... (more) |
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Summer Wars (2009) |
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| Mamoru Hosoda (Director) |
|
Kenji is a part-time computer programmer from a poor family who has never had a girlfriend. Aside from the fact that he was almost selected to represent Japan in the Mathematics Olympiad he considers... (more) |
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The Tale of the Big Computer (aka The End of Man?) (1966) |
|
| Hannes Alfven (writing as Olof Johannesson) |
|
"Alfven, the Swedish physicist and astrophysicist who was
awarded the Nobel prize for his development of plasma physics
and magnetohydrodynamics (but is perhaps better remembered
... (more) |
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Tetraktys (2009) |
|
| Ari Juels |
|
A thriller in which a classicist with expertise in cryptography helps to track down a Pythagorean cult that has apparently discovered the ability to factor large integers quickly and therefore can break... (more) |
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The Three-Body Problem (2006) |
|
| Cixin Liu (author) / Ken Liu (translator) |
|
This creative "first contact" novel by a famous Chinese science fiction author won many awards, including the Hugo award.
Like much "hard SF", it is a work of fiction in which the ideas are at least... (more) |
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The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (2015) |
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| Sydney Padua |
|
This graphic novel starts out as a basically realistic fictionalized biography of the 19th century mathematicians Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, even if it is a biography with a snarky sense of humor.... (more) |
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Transition Dreams (1993) |
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| Greg Egan |
|
Transition dreams, an old man learns in this story, are dreams that your new, robotic brain has as it is being "filled up" with the patterns copied from your old, organic brain. There is a good deal of... (more) |
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Travelling Salesman (2012) |
|
| Andy Lanzone (writer) / Timothy Lanzone (director and writer) |
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This film is a low-budget intellectual thriller about a Fields Medalist who, while working for the NSA, helps to prove that P=NP and takes part in the deliberations to decide what to do with it. "Travelling... (more) |
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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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The Turing Option (1992) |
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| Harry Harrison / Marvin Minksy |
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A mathematical prodigy uses his expertise in artificial intelligence to repair his own brain after he is shot in the head in this novel by famed AI researcher Marvin Minsky together with science fiction... (more) |
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Turing's Apples (2008) |
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| Stephen Baxter |
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Story about a far-away civilization transmitting a complex message in all directions, containing a software program (“Turing machine”) which ends up creating von Neumann machines with one... (more) |
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Turing's Delirium (2007) |
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| Edmundo Paz Soldan |
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This is a hacker-counter-hacker story set in Bolivia, where the newly resurrected president hires an NSA official to set up the country's counter-espionage / cyber-security unit ("Black Chamber"). The... (more) |
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Villages (2004) |
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| 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) |
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The Visiting Professor (1994) |
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| 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) |
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Void Star (2017) |
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| Zachary Mason |
|
This is a beautifully written and deep work of near-future science fiction about the development of an amazingly powerful sort of artificial intelligence. Two of the characters are mathematical both in name and perspective: Thales is a mathematically inclined Brazilian billionaire who encounters a mysterious AI which calls itself "the mathematician". (more) |
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Wang's Carpets (1995) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
This short story about a life form based on Wang Tiles first appeared in 1995 in Greg Bear's New Legends collection but was later expanded into an entire novel. For more information, see my entry on the... (more) |
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White Rabbit, Red Wolf [This Story is a Lie] (2018) |
|
| Tom Pollock |
|
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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WWW: Wake (2009) |
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| Robert J. Sawyer |
|
A blind math prodigy uses her ability to "see" what is going on in the Internet (watch out for the pun: Websight) to discover the emergence of a virtual life form. This is a solid and very readable hard... (more) |
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Young Beaker (1973) |
|
| J.T. Lamberty, Jr. |
|
A singular individual who knows how to do mental arithmetic triumphs over peers in a future where everyone has become dependent on calculators and computers. That description would apply equally to this... (more) |
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