a list compiled by Alex Kasman (College of Charleston)
a list compiled by Alex Kasman (College of Charleston)
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Women in Mathematical Fiction is an article I wrote for the Association of Women in Mathematics that appeared in their January 2011 issue.
Mathematics in Fiction: An Interdisciplinary Course is an article I wrote describing the class I taught for the Honors College here at the College of Charleston. This article appeared in the journal PRIMUS (Volume XIII Number 1, March 2003, Pages 1-16).
An article I wrote offers a "whirl-wind" tour of mathematics in science fiction. The article was published in the April 2004 issue of Math Horizons and is available here as a PDF file.
The Notices of the American Mathematical Society published my editorial (November 2011, p. 1407) arguing that more mathematicians should pay attention to mathematics in fiction. You can read it here.
The Society of Actuaries runs an annual fiction contest (see here). If only they were professionally published, I'd include them in the Mathematical Fiction database. In any case, you should certainly take a look at some of these enjoyable and mathematical (from an applied statistics perspective) stories.
I wrote a survey of fictional mathematics which appears in Mathematics in Popular Culture (edited by Jess and Elizabeth Sklar). The basic idea of the article is to consider and classify only those works of fiction containing discussions of imaginary mathematical results. In fact, there are not that many such works of fiction, since most mathematical fiction either includes only discussions of real mathematics or avoids any detailed discussion of math all together. So, I found I was able to really consider and compare most if not all of the interesting examples at once.
The most scholarly article I have written about mathematical fiction is my survey of the use of chaos theory and fractal geometry in fiction. It was published in The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Mathematics (2021).
I collaborated with Osnat Fellus, David Low, Lynette Guzman, and Ralph Mason on the article Hidden Figures, Hidden Messages: The Construction of Mathematical Identities with Children's Picturebooks.
Keith Devlin's November 1998 essay "Math Becomes Way
Cool" discusses the recent success of math in the movies.
Tel Aviv University professor Leo Corry has posted an article he wrote about acceptable levels of inaccuracy in mathematical fiction, which focuses especially on Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture and Partition.
Use this link to read David Folwer's article Mathematics as Science Fiction which appeared in World Literature Today (May-June 2010).
Frequent site contributor Vijay Fafat has long been telling me about his plans to create his own Mathematical Fiction website which would not only have reviews but also distribute free copies of the works. As of July 2024, and with help from Professor Mythili Vutukuru, he has finally achieved that goal. Visit it at mathfiction.net.