Contributed by
Liam Bulkley
I was perusing your site and I happened to think of a great addition to your list. It's by Polish philosopher Stanislaw Lem and called "The Cyberiad". It's about the adventures of two super "inventors" who basically build impossible machines(like a "Turing Machine" that breaks Godel's law; another that breaks the Second Law of Thermodynamics[or perhaps it's the Third- I tend to get them confused] by extracting information from a HIGHLY entropic system, etc.). Lem seems to have an excellent grasp of the material and weaves very enjoyable stories.
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Contributed by
"William E. Emba"
THE CYBERIAD is not a novel, but a collection of short
stories starring the twin constructors Trurl and Klapaucius. The story
"The First Sally, or Trurl's Electronic Bard" includes an explicitly
mathematical poem. "The Third Sally, or the Dragons of Probability"
involves a gadget to generate improbability.
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Contributed by
Anonymous
A true joy for anyone who has taken more than a few math classes.
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Contributed by
Lapo Fanciullo
A really enjoyable book and an intelligent one, too.
By the way, in one of the stories there's an exhilarating scene in which the protagonists make calculations - with pen and paper - to be certain their invention will force the king they're working for to pay them (I don't know the title, but it's a story in which a hunting-fond king asks them to invent a challenging pray): perhaps the book should be inserted in the "Future prediction through maths" motif.
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Contributed by
cephalopoid
From a demon cursed to enumerate all possible true statements to the (im-)probability of dragons, from the pursuit of happiness to very practical solutions to arms races, this collection of robot fables in space has got you covered. It's typical Lem where concepts and ideas taken to the absurdly surreal level still teach useful lessons about us, silly humans.
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