MATHEMATICAL FICTION:

a list compiled by Alex Kasman (College of Charleston)

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The Ghosts (1908)
Lord Dunsany
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Contributed by Vijay Fafat

The story line is very simple. Two brothers disagree about the existence of ghosts. They have an argument and the brother who clings to rationality wants to put it to test. On a hungry stomach, amidst dark oak and chilly night, he ends up facing a ghostly experience and murderous thoughts. Just as he about to give in to the whole irrationality of it, he starts thinking out that opposite angles of intersecting straight lines are equal, and its Euclidean proof. By the force of this logical thought, all his hallucinations vanish, reminding one of Charles Dickens' Scrooge telling the ghost in A Christmas Carol: “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

Available Free Online at MathFiction.net: "The Ghosts" is available as a PDF from Vijay Fafat and Prof. Mythili Vutukuru's MathFiction.net website.

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.)

Works Similar to The Ghosts
According to my `secret formula', the following works of mathematical fiction are similar to this one:
  1. The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft
  2. Through the Gates of the Silver Key by H.P. Lovecraft / E. Hoffmann Price
  3. The Dreams in the Witch-House by H.P. Lovecraft
  4. Old Fillikin by Joan Aiken
  5. The Lions in the Desert by David Langford
  6. Grigori’s Solution by Isobelle Carmody
  7. Erasthones' Map by Damon Nomad
  8. Asymmetrical Dreams by Josh Snider
  9. Danny’s Inferno by Albert Cowdrey
  10. Solve for X by Wil Forbis
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Categories:
GenreFantasy, Horror,
Motif
Topic
MediumShort Stories, Available Free Online,

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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)