First appeared in The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy and was reprinted in Neutrino Drag.

Now, those of you are inclined to read the story based on W.E.Emba's description should go ahead and do so before continuing on to my further analysis below.

For everyone else, let me begin by saying that the tension between "pure" and "applied" math is a major theme in this story. The mathematician character is one of those pure mathematicians who deplores the idea that math might have any applications. [To be honest, I must admit that some mathematicians with this viewpoint do exist. G.H. Hardy is a famous example. However, for those who do not know many actual mathematicians, I would like to add that this is honestly a minority viewpoint. There are more mathematicians out there who either are neutral or who really appreciate it when math finds applications. And, of course, there are those at the other extreme who consider themselves applied mathematicians and despise math when it is "pure".]

However, it is not because of this attitude that the character is mocked by his colleagues. The non-mathematicians in the story seem to truly appreciate that his research on n-dimensional manifolds is impressive and perhaps deserving of a Fields medal. It is his religious belief in a strong connection between his Catholicism and mathematics, on the other hand, which results in his being teased. And this is why the saints, armed with the ability to apply mathematical results to change the nature of reality, arrive to help him.

Among the mathematics discussed in the story are higher dimensional geometry, fractal geometry (mentioning the name of Mandelbrot), chaos theory (mentioning a paper by Stephen Smale), Fermat's Last Theorem and the briefest mention of Banach-Tarski and conformal mappings. In addition, the name "Rudy Rucker" is dropped along with the suggestion that he will win a Nobel prize in literature.