 |
You and Whose Army? (2020) |
 | Greg Egan |
|
This Greg Egan story is about quadruplets who share memories. One of the brothers is a math teacher and two are grad students working on theses in different mathematical subdisciplines. The story is... (more)
Last Changed: 2026-02-24 21:10:20 |
|
 |
Understudies (2025) |
 | Greg Egan |
|
In this short story, a group of young people who cannot afford expensive AI implants try to figure out how they will compete in the marketplace with those who can. Their plan involves getting those richer... (more)
Last Changed: 2026-02-22 21:47:34 |
|
|
Fatal Gambit [Memoria] (2023) |
|
| David Lagercrantz |
|
There really is almost no mathematical content to this novel from the series featuring the protagonists Hans Rekke and Micaela Vargas. Chess is of much greater importance to the plot than is mathematics.... (more)
Last Changed: 2026-01-29 08:01:42 |
|
|
True Love and Other Impossible Odds (2024) |
|
| Christina Li |
|
As the subtitle says, this is a "Contemporary YA Romance About Grief, College, and Attraction Beyond Algorithms".
The protagonist, Grace Tang, is a college freshman who creates a mathematical model... (more)
Last Changed: 2026-01-27 08:08:45 |
|
|
A Calendar of Chaos (1991) |
|
| G. David Nordley |
|
This is a murder mystery which takes place at "the Chaos Institute, a sort of
retreat for theoretical mathematicians
concerned with the long-term behavior
of hypersensitive systems."
The institute... (more)
Last Changed: 2026-01-08 11:19:10 |
|
|
The Life of Chuck (2025) |
|
| Stephen King (author) / Mike Flannagan (screenplay and director) |
|
This excellent 2025 film did not get a lot of attention during its brief run in movie theaters. That may partly be because it is difficult to say much about the plot without spoilers. Consequently, I... (more)
Last Changed: 2026-01-01 17:30:55 |
|
|
A Mathematician's Guide to Being Normal (2025) |
|
| Sam E. Sutin |
|
High school students worry about being "normal", in the sense of being like other kids. The protagonist of this story handles many of the problems of adolescence by (metaphorically) applying various technical... (more)
Last Changed: 2025-12-20 23:06:09 |
|
|
Futurama (Episode: The Numberland Gap) (2025) |
|
| Ken Walsh (writer) / Andrew Han (director) |
|
In this episode, the Planet Express crew travel though a hole in space (the titular "Numberland Gap") to a universe of abstraction inhabitted by rational numbers.
Having human characters interact with... (more)
Last Changed: 2025-12-11 15:29:31 |
|
|
|
|
Three Days and a Child [Shlosha Yamim VeYeled] (1965) |
|
| Abraham B. Yehoshua |
|
Dov, an Israeli mathematics graduate student, watches the young child of a woman he knew at a kibbutz. Unsure if the child is his, he alternates between loving the child as he still loves the woman and... (more)
Last Changed: 2025-11-15 21:18:51 |
|
|
Yarn Theory (2025) |
|
| Marie Vibbert |
|
Many works of science fiction concern the use of mathematics for communication with extraterrestrial being. (See the list of similar works below for some examples.) Madame Defarge in the Charles Dickens... (more)
Last Changed: 2025-11-14 16:10:07 |
|
|
The Hangman's Brother (2023) |
|
| David Sheskin |
|
This short story begins with the following odd setup:
Minutes before his execution for blasphemy the brilliant Pakistani mathematician Zahid Abidi whispered into the ear of the hangman who would fasten... (more)
Last Changed: 2025-11-14 10:26:45 |
|
|
Knots (2022) |
|
| David Sheskin |
|
After a quote about knots from Wikipedia, this short story begins with this odd setup:
Minutes before his execution for blasphemy a brilliant Iranian mathematician whispered into the right ear of... (more)
Last Changed: 2025-11-14 10:06:38 |
|
|
Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016) |
|
| Madeleine Thien |
|
This is one of those novels that interweaves storylines in two different time periods. The contemporary one is narrated by Marie Jiang (aka Jiang Li-ling) who is a math professor in British Columbia.... (more)
Last Changed: 2025-11-02 13:36:00 |
|
|
The Beauty Within (2013) |
|
| Marguerite Kaye |
|
In this romance novel, a woman who has interest in mathematics and no interest in finding a husband beguiles an Italian artist.
Like many of the other works of "mathematical romance", this one is historical... (more)
Last Changed: 2025-10-24 20:09:20 |
|
|
Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming [Báró Wenckheim hazatér] (2016) |
|
| László Krasznahorkai |
|
This novel by the 2025 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature mostly concerns the titular baron returning to his hometown in Hungary after generating a huge gambling debt in Argentina. However, another... (more)
Last Changed: 2025-10-24 14:30:36 |
|
|
Foundation's Fear (Second Foundation Book I) (1999) |
|
| Gregory Benford |
|
This prequel to Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series was part of a trilogy endorsed by Asimov's estate. This first book, by physicist Gregory Benford, showed "mathist" Hari Seldon becoming involved in politics... (more)
Last Changed: 2025-10-22 17:41:39 |
|
|
The Bishop Murder Case (1928) |
|
| S.S. van Dine (pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright) |
|
Our hero, Philo Vance, says at the end of this mystery novel: "At the outset I was able to postulate a mathematician as the criminal agent. The difficulty of naming the murderer lay in the fact that nearly... (more)
Last Changed: 2025-10-05 20:22:53 |
|
|
The Waters (2024) |
|
| Bonnie Jo Campbell |
|
"Donkey" is a young girl living on a remote Michigan island with her grandmother, an eccentric herbalist. A popular math book from her aunt Prim called "Garden of Logic by Professor A. Schweiss" is like... (more)
Last Changed: 2025-09-24 16:11:21 |
|
|
Katabasis (2025) |
|
| R.F. Kuang |
|
As frequent contributor Aidan Thompkins explains, the characters in this horror/fantasy novel use mathematics to perform magic and to explore the bizarre geometry of Hell itself:
R. F. Kuang is one... (more)
Last Changed: 2025-09-19 19:48:06 |
|
|
Ambiguity Machines: An Examination (2015) |
|
| Vandana Singh |
|
These three linked short stories are presented as part of an exam in "abstract engineering". Each story presents a specific example of device that exists only in "conceptual machine-space". The second... (more)
Last Changed: 2025-09-15 14:13:29 |
|
|
How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky (2014) |
|
| Lydia Netzer |
|
Although they both work at the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, George Dermont and Irene Sparks are an odd couple in that he's a romantic and a believer in all sorts of supernatural things while she is a... (more)
Last Changed: 2025-09-11 11:31:07 |
|
|
Albert's Cradle (1993) |
|
| Paul Levinson |
|
This work of fiction purports to be Albert Einstein's last thoughts about non-Euclidean geometry, as written on his deathbed:
None of my work would have been possible without
Lobachevskian geometry.... (more)
Last Changed: 2025-09-04 15:49:18 |
|
|
The Tyranny of Numbers (1994) |
|
| William Spencer |
|
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,... (more)
Last Changed: 2025-09-04 15:18:31 |
|
|
The Statistician (1991) |
|
| Bev Jafek |
|
The statistician of the title introduces himself by saying:
You MUST KNOW ME: I’m the man who proved that
the percentage of rodent hair and excrement in the average candy bar is.00152. If you Ve... (more)
Last Changed: 2025-09-04 11:43:44 |
|
|
The Duke is Mine (2011) |
|
| Eloisa James |
|
In this retelling of "The Princess and the Pea" as a romance novel, the character of Quin starts out with some unusual characteristics for the love interest in that genre. He is a "mama's boy" and a "math... (more)
Last Changed: 2025-09-02 09:30:58 |
|
|
Lucky Day (2025) |
|
| Chuck Tingle |
|
Things seem to be going well for Vera at the start of Chuck Tingle's "Lucky Day". She is the youngest math/stats professor at the University of Chicago whose first book has just been published and she... (more)
Last Changed: 2025-08-29 13:42:57 |
|
|
The Unending Constant (2025) |
|
| Christopher Banyas |
|
In the kingdom of K where math is used to assign careers to children before they can even walk, generations of "Kalculators" are given the job of running the Perimetros machine which computes sequential... (more)
Last Changed: 2025-08-27 08:01:24 |
|
|
|
|
The Symbol of Darkness: A Tale of an Unknown Quantity (1849) |
|
| Anonymous |
|
Set in the Empire of the Grand Quadratic and filled with dark and bellicose imagery, this is one of those stories where the characters are themselves mathematical objects:
There
were the warlike Symbols,... (more)
Last Changed: 2025-08-25 16:25:54 |
|
