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A Deprogrammer's Tale (2000) |
| Colin Adams |
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This spoof presents the attempts of math professors to convince students to become math majors and the subsequent interest of those students in math as if it were a religious cult. Told from the point... (more) |
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The Integral: A Horror Story (2009) |
| Colin Adams |
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This story, which he claims is an attempt to emulate Stephen King, is different from many of Adams' others. This may explain why it was published for the first time in his 2009 collections Riot at the... (more) |
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Into Thin Air (2000) |
| Colin Adams |
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This was the first of Colin Adams' ``Mathematically Bent'' columns for the Mathematical Intelligencer, published back in Vol.22, No. 1, 2000. It combines many of the analogies between mountain climbing... (more) |
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Journey to the Center of Mathematics (2006) |
| Colin Adams |
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A parody of the classic Jules Verne tale, which reads like what Woody Allen would have written if he had taken math instead of philosophy at NYU:
The next day, we booked travel on a steamer across the... (more) |
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A Killer Theorem (2007) |
| Colin Adams |
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Mangum, P.I. returns in this mystery in which the unproven Gauss' Last Lemma is wielded as a murder weapon. Apparently, a certain approach to proving it is so enticing that merely showing it to mathematicians... (more) |
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Lost in the Math Museum (2022) |
| Colin Adams |
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Teenager Kallie, who doesn't particularly care for math, gets trapped in a math museum with her father and his friend Maria. They endure horrific dangers and meet the ghosts of famous mathematicians (as... (more) |
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Mangum, P.I. (2004) |
| Colin Adams |
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A parody of the hard-boiled private detective genre in which ``P.I.'' stands for ``Principal Investigator'', a phrase familiar to anyone who has applied for a research grant. In this hilarious story,... (more) |
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Mathematically Bent (2000) |
| Colin Adams |
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Geometer and knot-theorist Colin Adams (Williams College, MA) has been writing this short, mathematically-wise and bitingly funny column in the quarterly issues of The Mathematical Intelligencer since... (more) |
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On Another Plane (2020) |
| Colin Adams |
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A woman with flowing white hair and flowing white robes sits next to a mathematician on a plane and very casually helps him to prove the Riemann Hypothesis.
‘‘I'm not much for knowing what's... (more) |
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A Proof of God (2004) |
| Colin Adams |
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A mathematician is approached by a seemingly crazy old man who claims to have a proof of the existence of God, but later it seems that he might not be so crazy after all in this hilarious spoof from Adams'... (more) |
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Pythagoras's Darkest Hour (2007) |
| Colin Adams |
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A humorous short story from the author of Mathematically Bent which tells the true story of the discovery of the Pythagorean Theorem. Well, actually, perhaps it isn't exactly true...but it is so good,... (more) |
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Robbins v. New York (2008) |
| Colin Adams |
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The author of the Mathematical Intelligencer's "Mathematically Bent" column has a talent for making me laugh, and this piece which has the US Supreme Court justices debating higher math and modern physics... (more) |
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Rumpled Stiltskin (2004) |
| Colin Adams |
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Do you remember the old Fractured Fairy Tales segment on Rocky and Bullwinkle in which classic stories were updated with a twist? This is just like those. The old Grimm's Brother tale is retold, but... (more) |
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Zombies and Calculus (2014) |
| Colin Adams |
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The story opens with a math professor teaching his class on a seemingly ordinary day when a student who has arrived late turns out to be the first of a wave of flesh eating zombies who are running amok... (more) |
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