| Although Piero Della Francesca is today best known as an early Renaissance artist, he was also a mathematician. (See Math Tutor Biographies for a summary of his mathematical work.
In this short story, a computer version of him is brought back into existence using a bizarre method that combines collecting DNA from his gravesite and raising a simulation of him in a virtual recreation of 15th Century Italy. At first, the people who went to a lot of trouble to do this were disappointed with the results, which mostly saw him addressing theological implications of the fact that his world was made up of binary numbers. But, after they gave him knowledge of the scientific and techological advances that have taken place since his death, he also got philosophical about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and also did something they really didn't like with the Fibonacci Sequence!
This story was orginally published in the January 1994 Issue of Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. I learned about its existence from MathFiction.net . |
