 |
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) |
|
 |
Actuarial / The Paradox Paradox (2010) |
 | Buzz Mauro |
|
These two extremely short stories by Mauro, part of his thesis project which consisted entirely of original works of mathematical fiction, appeared in the December 2010 issue of Prime Number Magazine.
Actuarial... (more) |
|
|
The Adventures of the Parrot (2008) |
|
| Gary Brown |
|
Gary I. Brown, chair of the math department at CSBSJU in St. Joseph MN, has written two detective stories in which "The Parrot" uses mathematics (specifically, non-zero sum games and fair division problems) to solve the mysteries. The stories appear together in a new book from North Star Press which is available from Amazon.com .
(more) |
|
|
Against the Odds (2001) |
|
| Martin Gardner |
|
Luther Washington, a young, African-American boy in Butterfield, KS must overcome several kinds of prejudice to become a mathematician.
First, he must face the prejudices of his father that his interest... (more) |
|
|
Art Thou Mathematics? (1978) |
|
| Charles Mobbs |
|
Short story (Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, October 1978 Vol. 98 No 10) concerning the very nature of mathematical discovery. It was later rewritten in the form of a play, which the author has... (more) |
|
|
Astor Place Barber (2023) |
|
| Audrey Nasar |
|
A short piece that employs a humorous McGuffin to introduce the Barber's Paradox.
Both frequent site contributor Dr. Allan Goldberg and the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics think this is an example... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Axiom of Dreams (2023) |
|
| Arula Ratnakar |
|
An aspiring mathematician gets a brain implant designed to aid her research on Gödel Incompleteness in the hopes that it will help her get accepted into a PhD program. But, against the advice of... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Babelogic of Mathematics (2023) |
|
| Vijay Fafat |
|
This is a creation myth for mathematics itself, incorporating the writing styles of both the Book of Genesis and Nasadiya Sukta. The author, it should be noted, is a frequent contributor to this website... (more) |
|
|
Battle of the Frog and the Mouse (1984) |
|
| John Hays |
|
This succinct, well-writtten fable captures the polemics between Hilbert and Brouwer related to Hilbert's Formalist position and Brouwer's Constructivist position vis a vis the foundations of mathematics... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Blue Tigers (1977) |
|
| Jorge Luis Borges |
|
The protagonist, a Scotsman, chases down reports of a blue species of tigers sighted in village in Punjab, Pakistan. He never finds a blue tiger but ends up obtaining some magical stones on a hillside... (more) |
|
|
Brazzaville Beach (1990) |
|
| William Boyd |
|
Main character is a women studying chimpanzees in Africa, but her
ex-husband is a set theorist who goes mad because he fails to prove a
theorem.
One of my favourite authors, and one of his best... (more) |
|
|
Cantor's War (1974) |
|
| Christopher Anvil |
|
In my opinion, this story is slanderous and the author should be ashamed.
The plot involves a science fiction scenario in which the human military is battling aliens in "tau space". Whenever we send... (more) |
|
|
Cantor’s Dragon (2014) |
|
| Craig DeLancy |
|
An absolutely fabulous tale of a man outwitting the devil, reminiscent of “The Devil and Simon Flagg” and in a very creative way. George Cantor, who has been hospitalized with mental exhaustion from... (more) |
|
|
The Catalyst [The Strange Attractor] (1991) |
|
| Desmond Cory |
|
Mathematics professor John Dobie gets caught up in a truly mind-boggling
mystery when one of his former students, his wife's best friend, and then
his own wife wind up dead, and the police consider him to be a prime
suspect.
This is the first, my personal favorite, of the three "Professor Dobie
Mysteries" written by British author Desmond Cory. (See also "The Mask of Zeus" and " (more) |
|
|
A Certain Ambiguity: A Mathematical Novel (2007) |
|
| Gaurav Suri / Hartosh Singh Bal |
|
The intertwined stories of Ravi, a Stanford student taking a course on "Infinity" in the 1980's, and his grandfather who was jailed for blasphemy in New Jersey in 1919 constitute a philosophical investigation... (more) |
|
|
The Chosen (1967) |
|
| Chaim Potok |
|
In Chaim Potok's classic novel about two Jewish teenagers growing up in New York City at the end of World War II, one of the two boys expresses an interest in symbolic logic:
'What kind of mathematics... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Conjure Wife (Dark Ladies) (1953) |
|
| Fritz Leiber |
|
Norman Saylor, a professor of anthropology/sociology, discovers his wife has been practicing magic for years, and that their
house is loaded with charms. Annoyed at her secret superstitious bent, he... (more) |
|
|
Context (2005) |
|
| John Meaney |
|
This is the second book in the Nulapeiron Sequence by John Meaney. The protagonist is still Tom Corcorigan, who in the first novel rose from slavery to royalty in part because of his "logosophical" (read... (more) |
|
|
Continuums (2008) |
|
| Robert Carr |
|
The decisions we make and the difficulty in accepting the consequences is the main focus of this book about a Romanian mathematician who leaves her country and her daughter to be in a place that she could... (more) |
|
|
The Cyberiad (1967) |
|
| Stanislaw Lem |
|
I was perusing your site and I happened to think of a great addition to your list. It's by Polish philosopher Stanislaw Lem and called "The Cyberiad". It's about the adventures of two super "inventors"... (more) |
|
|
Dark Integers (2007) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
The ``cold war'' between this universe with our mathematical laws and a bordering universe with different ones (which began in "Luminous") heats up when the numerical experiments of a mathematical physicist... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Diabologic (1955) |
|
| Eric Frank Russell |
|
Tagline: “One way to keep a man from getting anywhere is to give him a toy—a nonsense puzzle —that he can’t put down. It’s much more effective than trying to forcibly hold him!”
This is... (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) |
|
|
Division by Zero (1991) |
|
| Ted Chiang |
|
Answers the question: what would happen if we found out that
mathematics is inconsistent? This is a great piece of
mathematical fiction. (Thanks to Frank Chess who pointed it out to
me.)
Renee... (more) |
|
|
Domaine [Domain] (2009) |
|
| Patric Chiha (screenplay and director) |
|
This subtle, slow and depressing French film concerns the relationship between a homosexual teenager and his alcoholic aunt. She is a math professor whose research is connected to Gödel's Theorem, and... (more) |
|
|
The Einstein Enigma (2010) |
|
| José Rodrigues Dos Santos |
|
An adventure novel whose MacGuffin is a proof of the existence of God, formulated and hidden by Albert Einstein. There is more talk than action, which may disappoint some readers.
For those interested... (more) |
|
|
Euclid Alone (1975) |
|
| William F. Orr |
|
An administrator in the math department of a major research institute
has to decide how to handle a paper which proves the inconsistency of
Euclidean geometry.
Math is definitely central to this... (more) |
|
|
|
|
The Face of the Waters (1991) |
|
| Robert Silverberg |
|
The novel is set on a water-logged planet called “Hydros”, populated by artificial islands floating on a planet-spanning ocean. A few humans on one of the islands end up offending the local... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
A Foundation in Wisdom (2012) |
|
| Robert Loyd Watson |
|
A hitchhiker named Sheridan captivates the man kind enough to offer him a ride with fantastic tales of the Roman village of Ebon and the hero named Marcus who saved it from a giant dachshund named Dachy.
Both... (more) |
|
|
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 Dynasty (1936) |
|
| R.R. Winterbotham |
|
A confused story of a couple (Victor and Georgiana) who go into
cryogenic suspended animation for a million and a half years and wake
up in the era of the Fourth Dynasty, the age of the Kora (first... (more) |
|
|
För immer in Honig (Forever in Honey) (2005) |
|
| Dietmar Dath |
|
Site visitor Hauke Reddmann writes from Germany to tell me about this experimental German novel which includes diagrams from category theory. (For those who might not know, category theory is an abstract... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
|
|
Getaway from Getawehi (1969) |
|
| Colin Kapp |
|
Colin Kapp has written a few stories which have some good, hard SF mixed up with highly tongue-in-cheek, believable flights of fancy. The present story is set on the single planet, Getawehi, of a rogue... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Gödel geht [Gödel's Exit] (1991) |
|
| Andreas Findig |
|
Kurt Gödel's reflection steps out of the mirror and joins him at his table in a cafe. (That may seem weird, but the author assures us that such fantastical things are always happening in Vienna.) Since... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Gödel's Sunflowers (1992) |
|
| Stephen Baxter |
|
Far in the future, a human explores a giant fractal construction which is a
physical realization of the total knowledge of the creatures which created
it long ago. In the process he learns about (more) |
|
|
Gödel, Escher Bach: an eternal golden braid (1979) |
|
| Douglas Hofstadter |
|
Pulitzer Prize wining book whose chapters alternate between fictional
"dialogues" and more standard non-fiction format to present ideas from
philosophy, art, music and psychology as well as mathematical... (more) |
|
|
Herbrand's Conjecture and the White Sox Scandal (1993) |
|
| Eliot Fintushel |
|
Hi, I'm Eliot Fintushel, the author of HERBRAND'S CONJECTURE AND THE WHITE
SOX SCANDAL. The idea is that the mathematical logician Jacques Herbrand
who actually did die in a mountaineering accident... (more) |
|
|
Herr Doctor's Wondrous Smile (1998) |
|
| Vladimir Tasic |
|
In this short story, a logician who really does not take the superstitions
of numerology seriously is invited to a "fringe" conference where he
delivers a talk on the mystical implications of Gregory... (more) |
|
|
Hilbert's Hotel (1999) |
|
| Ian Stewart |
|
Another take on the idea (attributed to lectures by David Hilbert) that the bizarre properties of the countably infinite can best be presented through the analogy of a hotel. Here, Mr. and Mrs. Smith... (more) |
|
|
The Imitation Game (2014) |
|
| Morten Tyldum (director) / Graham Moore (screenplay) |
|
This film about Alan Turing and his role in breaking the Nazi enigma code has been a critical and financial success. It has won numerous awards and brought huge crowds of people to see a movie about a... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Incomplete Proofs (2012) |
|
| John Chu |
|
This unusual piece combines equal parts fashion industry and math research, with a dash of fantasy and just a pinch of homo-eroticism. Grant does a favor for his old partner, Duncan, by modeling his new... (more) |
|
|
Incompleteness (2004) |
|
| Apostolos Doxiadis |
|
A play by the author of Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture on the last, sad days in the life of Kurt Gödel. After a "workshop production" in Athens, Greece (June 24-28, 2003) the show's official... (more) |
|
|
Infinities (2010) |
|
| Vandana Singh |
|
A nicely written story about Abdul Karim, a mathematics teacher at the local municipal school, set against the backdrop of the religious turmoil between Hindus and Muslims in India. I couldn't quite... (more) |
|
|
Instantiation (2019) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
In this sequel to 3-adica, the conscious video game characters plan an escape that feels like a cross between Mission Impossible and Inception, but with the addition of famous mathematicians sitting around... (more) |
|
|
The Ishango Bone (2012) |
|
| Paul Hastings Wilson |
|
Amiele becomes the first female student at Trinity College and goes on to disprove the Riemann Hypothesis at the age of 26, but is denied the Fields Medal. Written as if it were her life story recorded... (more) |
|
|
Izzy at the Lucky Three (1996) |
|
| Eliot Fintushel |
|
There are two kinds of weird: good weird and bad weird. This story
is the third kind. I mean, what can you say about a story in which the
Yiddishe mystic Izzy encounters
the demon spirit who created... (more) |
|
|
Journey into a Dark Heart (1998) |
|
| Peter Hoeg |
|
This story appears in the collection Tales of the Night made up of stories by Hoeg that are all set on the evening of March 19, 1929. In this one, a depressed young Danish mathematician takes a train... (more) |
|
|
Journey to the Center of Mathematics (2006) |
|
| Colin Adams |
|
A parody of the classic Jules Verne tale, which reads like what Woody Allen would have written if he had taken math instead of philosophy at NYU:
The next day, we booked travel on a steamer across the... (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 formula di Ramanujan (2001) |
|
| Marco Abate (writer) / P. Ongaro (artist) |
|
A trip from Berkeley to India via Oxford to recover the lost Ramanujan's notebooks, pursued independently
by two (again, realistic) mathematicians, both driven by revenge, though of different kind.
Along... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Library Paradox (2006) |
|
| Catherine Shaw |
|
Vanessa Duncan returns as the skilled amateur detective of Victorian England in this third mystery novel by "Catherine Shaw". (See The Three-Body Problem and Flowers Stained with Moonlight for the earlier... (more) |
|
|
The Logic Pool (1997) |
|
| Stephen Baxter |
|
The Logic Pool deals with an intelligence that is similar
to the meme-minds in Gregory Benford's Foundations Fear.
Meme-mind -- I think this means some sort of intelligence whose
existence arises... (more) |
|
|
A Logical Magician (1994) |
|
| Robert Weinberg |
|
A very creative romp through the lore of creatures of mythology and their return in modern times. A computer programmer creates a program to decode ancient texts and find the incantations to invoke powerful... (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) |
|
|
|
|
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) |
|
|
Luminous (1995) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
A truly wonderful story in which two math grad students discover that the things we consider to be "truths" in number theory are actually part of a dynamical system, subject to change over time and in... (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) |
|
|
Mathe-Matti (2022) |
|
| Anuradha Mahasinghe |
|
A collection of mathematical fiction short stories published in the country of Sri Lanka by Sayura Books. Unfortunately, I do not read Sinhalese and so have not been able to enjoy it myself, but the author... (more) |
|
|
|
|
The Mathematics of Magic (1940) |
|
| L. Sprague de Camp / Fletcher Pratt |
|
The "Enchanter Stories" by de Camp and Pratt are a very popular series of SF/fantasy stories whose protagonist, Harold Shea, is able to travel to other universes using symbolic logic. "The Mathematics... (more) |
|
|
The Mathenauts (1964) |
|
| Norman Kagan |
|
A hilarious story that plays with the mind-blowing idea that it may not be that mathematics describes reality, but instead that reality is mathematics.
In the future presented by this story, only those... (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) |
|
|
Merlin Planet (1968) |
|
| E.G. Von Wald |
|
A lovely tale which merges mathematics / logic systems and magic to a satisfying conclusion. And what a great hook of a tagline in the story! “On Arrey, you could survive - as a frog. Unless you could... (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) |
|
|
Multi-Colored Dome (1987) |
|
| Martin Gardner |
|
A light-hearted, short story about a shy but precocious Math student working on symbolic logic (“he had read “Principia Mathematica” when he was in high school, and understood it,... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Murder on the Einstein Express (2016) |
|
| Harun Šiljak |
|
An essay containing many interesting remarks and anecdotes about mathematics and mathematical physics presented in the form of a dialogue between a professor and students. Topics covered include entropy,... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Nightscape: The Dreams of Devils (2012) |
|
| David W. Edwards |
|
A teenage math prodigy is contacted by other-worldly beings through his nightmares. As the separation between dream and reality seems to disappear, he faces a supernatural threat with the help of a religious... (more) |
|
|
Not a Chance (2009) |
|
| Peter Haff |
|
A student harangues his physics professor about the possibility that all mathematical proofs are incorrect. His argument is based on the supposed uncertainty about the validity of proofs of the Four Color... (more) |
|
|
The Number of the Beast (1979) |
|
| Robert A. Heinlein |
|
Engineer and physicist Jacob Burroughs invents a time machine which lets
him travel to what we might consider "alternate universes". The underlying
mathematics involves the notion that there are in... (more) |
|
|
On the Occasion Of Your Graduation (2011) |
|
| Robert Dawson |
|
A thesis advisor entrusts his Ph.D. student with the responsibility of determining what to do with his discovery that mathematics contains inconsistencies.
This is one of several works of fiction that... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Oracle (2000) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Paradox (2000) |
|
| John Meaney |
|
Young Tom Corcorigan seems to represent the lowest "caste" in the extremely hierarchical human society of the year 3404. However, his mathematical abilities (he is able to figure out a way around Gödel's... (more) |
|
|
Permafrost (2019) |
|
| Alastair Reynolds |
|
The daughter of the mathematician whose research led to a practical method for time-travel is sent back in time to save the world in this creative science fiction novella.
Although I describe the work... (more) |
|
|
The Planck Dive (1998) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
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) |
|
|
Planck Time (2004) |
|
| Michael Iwoleit |
|
The setting is 2036 to 2038. A 140-km long linear collider ("Super Large Hadron Collider") has been installed at one of the L5 points in earth orbit. Some unknown technology must have been discovered... (more) |
|
|
Planck Zero (1992) |
|
| Stephen Baxter |
|
Baxter's hard-SF ideas are often quite stunning in their scope and creativity. "Planck Zero" is no exception to this. An advanced species of aliens - the Ghosts - have started conducting experiments... (more) |
|
|
PopCo (2004) |
|
| Scarlett Thomas |
|
Alice was raised by her grandparents, a mathematician and a cryptographer, and now uses what she learned from them to make mathematical puzzles for children. Her employer, the giant toy company "PopCo",... (more) |
|
|
Pröfung läuft: Eine Erzählung in n Testabschnitten (2018) |
|
| Dietmar Dath |
|
This short story which appeared in the January 2018 issue of the German magazine Konkret is more about politics/economics than math, but it features frequent high level discussions of mathematical logic... (more) |
|
|
Puzzles from Other Worlds (1984) |
|
| Martin Gardner |
|
This is the second collection of science fiction puzzles which Martin Gardner wrote for the Issac Asimov Science Fiction Magazine. The preface describes the book well (as well as the process of mathematical... (more) |
|
|
The Puzzling Adventures of Dr. Ecco (1988) |
|
| Dennis Shasha |
|
The first in a sequence of delightful books. This one offers 38 puzzles packaged very well as a collection of stories solved by Dr. Ecco. To introduce him:
“Dr. Jacob Ecco is a mathematical... (more) |
|
|
Pythagoras' Revenge: A Mathematical Mystery (2009) |
|
| Arturo Sangalli |
|
Freelance science journalist Sangalli has written a book which presents some historical information about Pythagoras and his beliefs in the form of a novel of the detail driven conspiracy theory adventure... (more) |
|
|
Pythagorean Crimes (2006) |
|
| Tefcros Michaelides |
|
This murder mystery takes place amid the exciting developments occurring in the mathematical and artistic communities in Europe between 1900 and 1931. Much of what one will learn by reading this book... (more) |
|
|
Q.E.D. (1984) |
|
| Bruce Stanley Burdick |
|
The "Q.E.D." from the title of this short story published in Analog
(volume 104 #12, December 1984, pp. 96-112) is the latin expression "quod
erat demonstratum" that is meant to conclude a proof and... (more) |
|
|
The Riddle of the Universe & Its Solution (1978) |
|
| Christopher Cherniak |
|
The literature is quite rich in the exploration of harmful memes which can take over the mind through the body’s sensory apparatus, effectively seizing up the brain into a coma or an endless loop.... (more) |
|
|
The Rubbish Researchers Puzzle (2018) |
|
| Michael W. Lucht |
|
Thanks to Dr. Allan Goldberg for bringing to my attention this humorous short story about a math professor hiding in a New Zealand pub from an angry looking mob of blue-eyed Pacific Islanders.
It concerns... (more) |
|
|
Science Fiction Puzzle Tales (1981) |
|
| Martin Gardner |
|
This is the first collection of science fiction puzzles which Martin Gardner wrote for the Issac Asimov Science Fiction Magazine. A number of these puzzles are mathematical, all very enjoyable. The preface:
When... (more) |
|
|
The Shackles of Conviction (2008) |
|
| James R. Meyer |
|
This novel intersperses a fictionalized account of the life of Kurt Gödel with the modern tale of an engineer who realizes (and eventually convinces the world) that Gödel's proof was flawed and that his (more) |
|
|
Shakespeare Predicted it All (2003) |
|
| Dietmar Dath |
|
An artistically composed piece about Georg Cantor, inventor of the theory of transfinite cardinals, in the form of a dialogue between the characters "1" and "2", both of whom are either Cantor or Hamlet.... (more) |
|
|
Space (1911) |
|
| John Buchan |
|
This mystical story, as recounted by a lawyer, is about a brilliant mathematician ("an erratic genius who had written some articles in Mind on that dreary subject, the mathematical conception of infinity",... (more) |
|
|
Spying on My Dreams (2000) |
|
| Laurence Howard |
|
In my second novel, Spying on My Dreams, my protagonist, a mathematician working for a computer game company, uses fuzzy logic to integrate Eastern and Western thought, and hence finds the meaning of... (more) |
|
|
Stella Maris (2022) |
|
| Cormac McCarthy |
|
Readers of McCarthy's 2022 novel The Passenger learn quickly that its protagonist's sister was a mathematical prodigy who committed suicide. That isolated fact provides motivation for the remainder of... (more) |
|
|
The Symbolic Logic of Murder (1960) |
|
| John Reese |
|
Through a combination of biblical mnemonics and Boolean algebra, our
heroes are able to solve a mysterious murder. Appears in Mathematical Magpie.
(more) |
|
|
Symposium (1974) |
|
| R.A. Lafferty |
|
This story consists of a philosophical discussion between characters with names like "Wye" and "Zed". A good bit of it is about mathematics and its foundations. For example:
"And, Zed," said O doubtfully,... (more) |
|
|
The Sleepwalkers (Schlafwandler) (1931) |
|
| Hermann Broch |
|
The third part of
this trilogy contains digressions in which Broch talks about logic,
mathematical axioms, and projective geometry. According to these
digressions, the lack of style of mathematics resembles the style of
modernity.
(more) |
|
|
The Third Party (2004) |
|
| David Moles |
|
Two conflicting groups of humans make contact with
a forgotten human world. One of the natives turns
out to be a brilliant mathematician, independently
discovering Cantor's diagonalization argument, and
is confused that a colleague considers it obvious.
This short story appeared in the September 2004 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. (more) |
|
|
Transition Dreams (1993) |
|
| 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) |
|
|
Tre per zero (1997) |
|
| T. Sclavi (writer) / B. Brindisi (artist) |
|
An Italian comic book whose title translates as "Three Times Zero".
A very surreal story where a (stereotypical but non-trivial) mathematician "discovers" that
three times zero equal three, and we... (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) |
|
|
Ultima Dea [The Last Goddess] (1994) |
|
| Gianni Riotta |
|
Unfortunately this book does not appear to have been
translated from the original Italian. One of the central
characters in the book, Alfred Diognetus (described as a
"saint mathematician") is the... (more) |
|
|
Ultima lezione a Gottinga [Last lecture at Göttingen] (2009) |
|
| Davide Osenda |
|
This beautifully illustrated comic book presents a professor's last lecture to a (nearly) empty auditorium as the Nazi's begin to gather the city's Jews outside. It is perhaps a stretch to call this "fiction";... (more) |
|
|
Uncle Georg's Attic (2002) |
|
| Ben Schumacher |
|
This short story appeared in the September 2002 issue of "Math Horizons",
published by the Mathematical Association of America. In it, some kids
look through an attic containing lots of stuff belonging... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Waiting for Citizen Gödel (2005) |
|
| Howard V. Hendrix |
|
Short story revolving around Godel's application for US citizenship. There is a well-known episode from Godel's life, where Einstein and Oscar Morgenstern took Godel for his citizenship oath. Godel,... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
What Happened at Cambridge IV (1990) |
|
| David Langford |
|
This is another BLIT story by David Langford; this time, a brilliant mathematician working on a neuro-mathematical model of the brain finds a type of visual input that doesn't just slow it down but causes... (more) |
|
|
What the Tortoise Said to Achilles (1895) |
|
| Lewis Carroll |
|
A very short dialogue-story, where the Tortoise teaches Achilles that in the strictest sense of Logic, the process of inference from even 2 propositions to an almost automatically-implied third proposition... (more) |
|
|
White Light, or What is Cantor's Continuum Problem? (1980) |
|
| Rudy Rucker |
|
I think the best description of this book is Naked Lunch
meets The Wild Numbers, with a cameo appearance by
Donald Duck's nephews. Happily, this book has recently been rereleased
(2001) in a new format... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Who Killed Professor X? (2010) |
|
| Thodoris Andriopoulos / Thanasis Gkiokas |
|
The famous mathematician Professor X (not to be confused with Charles Xavier) is found dead before his presentation to the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1900, and this graphic novel puts... (more) |
|
|
The World as I Found It (1987) |
|
| Bruce Duffy |
|
A fictionalized "biography" of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein
including a portrayal of Bertrand Russell.
"Very enjoyable, but barely scratches the surface of Wittgenstein's life,
work, and character... (more) |
|
