The issue of Amazing Spider-Man entitled "Sometimes it Snows in April" introduces a disheveled mathematician named Benjamin Rabin who appears to be the victim of an attempted assault. He explains to police that he is working in 10-dimensional models of reality where "binary input commands become useless". It is therefore necessary for him to do logic using symbols that resemble Mayan glyphs rather than just 0's and 1's. Of course, that doesn't actually make any sense, but it sounds much more believable when accompanied by the artist's drawings:
| (quoted from The Amazing Spider-Man (Issues 555-557))
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In subsequent issues ("The Last Nameless Day and "Dead of Winter"), it is revealed that he is not the innocent absent-minded professor that he appears to be, but is in fact, a serial killer who is sacrificing other people in the hope of gaining the power of a Mayan god himself. (Spoiler Alert: Spider-Man saves the day!)
I am very grateful to Bailey Ford, a student in my 2023 "Math in Fiction" seminar at the College of Charleston, for bringing this bit of mathematical fiction to my attention. |
