| Contributed by
Fred Galvin
It's a very well-written humorous tale (as expected if you're familiar with Lafferty). The mathematical content is a literal interpretation of the six typing monkeys. The angel Boshel, as a punishment, is assigned to supervise the project until the randomly-typing monkeys produce a perfect copy of the collected works of Shakespeare. The four and a half pages of the story follow the project through immense vistas of time, though not to completion. The story appeared in the December 1970 issue of Fantastic, and has been reprinted several times, e.g. in the anthology "Galactic Empires Volume One" by Brian W. Aldiss.
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| Contributed by
David R Tribble
Lafferty does a very good job of depicting extremely vast amounts of time, not to mention a great job of making it humorous. One of my favorite SF stories.
If you're interested, you can see my take on the infinite monkey conjecture at my website.
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| Contributed by
Keith Smith
Not a story about math, but the concept of infinity. The story tries to give the reader a way to grasp the concept of infinity, by trying to measure, what appears to the main character, as an infinite amount of time.
R.A. Lafferty is an underappreciated science fiction author.
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