a list compiled by Alex Kasman (College of Charleston)
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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 student is a genetically engineered child that the humans created to be able to survive on the planet where they were marooned. When the child asks why she has to learn about ancient Earth computer languages like LISP, the teacher again refers to the Fibonacci sequence to explain why the child would need to know her own past:
This metaphor is the only mathematical content of this work of mathematical fiction, but it is of fundamental importance as the rest of the story goes on to trace back the history of a small metal object that the child possesses and the reader sees its previous owners "solving earlier versions of the same problem" as they question their lives as Asian-Americans. This story originally appeared in Lightspeed in October 2013 and more recently republished in the Ken Liu anthology The Hidden Girl and Other Stories. |
More information about this work can be found at www.amazon.com. |
(Note: This is just one work of mathematical fiction from the list. To see the entire list or to see more works of mathematical fiction, return to the Homepage.) |
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Exciting News: The 1,600th entry was recently added to this database of mathematical fiction! Also, for those of you interested in non-fictional math books
let me (shamelessly) plug the recent release of the second edition of my soliton theory textbook.
(Maintained by Alex Kasman,
College of Charleston)