MATHEMATICAL FICTION:

a list compiled by Alex Kasman (College of Charleston)

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A non-Euclidean story or: how to persist when your geometry doesn’t (2022)
Rami Luisto
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This very unusual work of fiction is a proof of a technical mathematical fact in the form of a fantasy novel. The specific claim it proves is that a locally L-bilipschitz mapping between uniformly Ahlfors q-regular, complete and locally compact path-metric spaces X and Y is an L-bilipschitz map when Y is simply connected.

The author worked on this subject as a mathematics PhD student in Finland and decided to present it as a story about map-making dwarves living in a world where a mysterious event has changed the geometry of physical space, rendering 2-dimensional maps useless. The story can read for paragraphs as if it was a traditional fantasy novel, but then inexplicably switches to mathematical notation (including references to human mathematicians like Ahlfors and "bilipschitz").

I am not sufficiently expert in this area to judge whether this result is truly novel nor whether the proof is accurate, but I also have no reason to doubt that it is.

Thanks to Allan Goldberg for pointing it out to me when it was published in the January 2022 issue of The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.

More information about this work can be found at scholarship.claremont.edu.
(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 A non-Euclidean story or: how to persist when your geometry doesn’t
According to my `secret formula', the following works of mathematical fiction are similar to this one:
  1. Saint Joan of New York: A Novel About God and String Theory by Mark Alpert
  2. Katabasis by R.F. Kuang
  3. Lost in the Math Museum by Colin Adams
  4. The Babelogic of Mathematics by Vijay Fafat
  5. Squate by Tom Blackford
  6. Mandelbrot the Magnificent by Liz Ziemska
  7. Nightscape: The Dreams of Devils by David W. Edwards
  8. When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill
  9. Night of the Frightening Fractions by Robert Black
  10. Coyote Moon by John A. Miller
Ratings for A non-Euclidean story or: how to persist when your geometry doesn’t:
RatingsHave you seen/read this work of mathematical fiction? Then click here to enter your own votes on its mathematical content and literary quality or send me comments to post on this Webpage.
Mathematical Content:
5/5 (1 votes)
.
Literary Quality:
2/5 (1 votes)
..

Categories:
GenreFantasy,
MotifProving Theorems,
TopicGeometry/Topology/Trigonometry, Real Mathematics,
MediumNovels, Available Free Online,

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Where are the new works of mathematical fiction?: As you can see from this chronological listing, this database includes many works of mathematical fiction for each year from 1990 to 2025. Strangely, only two are listed for 2026, so far. Either less mathematical fiction is being published than in previous years or I'm just having more trouble finding it. If you know of any works of fiction that should be added to this list, especially recently published ones, please let me know. (Keep in mind that I do not include self-published works or children's fiction that just covers elementary mathematical concepts.) Thanks!

(Maintained by Alex Kasman, College of Charleston)