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1963 (1993) |
 | Alan Moore |
|
A six-issue series, one of the best of the retro comics out
there. this is Moore's ingenious pastiche of Marvel comics in
the critical (for Marvel and for the world) year 1963. Strange
things... (more) |
|
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2+2=5 (2006) |
 | Rudy Rucker / Terry Bisson |
|
A retired insurance adjuster and a math professor who was fired for telling his students that there are "holes" in the number line pass the time by trying to break a world record for counting. To achieve... (more) |
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3-adica (2018) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
Sentient characters in a horrific video game combining Jack the Ripper and vampires seek to escape to another game called 3-adica where things are strange but peaceful.
This is one of a series of stories... (more) |
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The Accidental Time Machine (2007) |
|
| Joe Haldeman |
|
A few mathematical ideas are tossed around casually in this light and entertaining science fiction story about a lab assistant who realizes before his boss that the device they are working on can be used... (more) |
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The Adventure of the Russian Grave (1995) |
|
| William Barton / Michael Capobianco |
|
Even in the old Arthur Conan Doyle stories, Sherlock Holmes' arch-nemesis was a mathematician. Moriarty was said to be a math professor who (when he wasn't being evil) worked on the binomial theorem and... (more) |
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The Adventures of Topology Man (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
Parody is easy....topology is hard!
In this short story, I made use of (and made fun of) the classic superhero comic book genre to illustrate some ideas from topology. So, we end up seeing a battle... (more) |
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After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall (2012) |
|
| Nancy Kress |
|
The last 26 humans alive resort to kidnapping children from the past in order to save themselves from the oppressive aliens who keep them in "The Shell". Mathematics enters in the form of Julie Kahn,... (more) |
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The Ah of Life (2010) |
|
| Banks Helfrich (Writer and Director) |
|
At the beginning of this film we see various stages in the life of Nigel. We see him as a high school student about to fail math due to lack of interest in the subject. We see him as an old man who enjoys... (more) |
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Aleph Sub One (1948) |
|
| Margaret St. Clair |
|
This is a little known story by a well known author from the Golden Age of Science Fiction. The math content is high, and it's a good story, definitely belongs on your Mathematical Fiction page.
From... (more) |
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Alex Detail's Revolution (2009) |
|
| Darren Campo |
|
A teenage genius uses (among other things) knowledge of the Golden Ratio to defeat an alien invasion. Campo handles the description of the math a bit better than some other authors ([cough]...Dan Brown...[cough]) but in the end it is nothing other than a bit of unbelievable mumbo jumbo in an otherwise math-free Sci-Fi adventure.
(more) |
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The Algebraist (2005) |
|
| Iain M. Banks |
|
Fassin Taak is a human in the year 4034 who has the job of communicating with the alien species known as "the dwellers". Since the dweller culture is billions of years old, they have accumulated tremendous... (more) |
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Algorithms and Nasal Structures (1998) |
|
| Lois H. Gresh |
|
This short story appears "in Aboriginal Science Fiction, Summer 1998.
CS grad student is having trouble programming sheep odors.
The story competently uses real programming terminology
(stacks, queues, etc). Includes a wee bit of trigonometry.
(more) |
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All on a Golden Afternoon (1956) |
|
| Robert Bloch |
|
"The title alludes to Alice in Wonderland, and the story is
indeed partly set in the two dream books. One Professor Laroc
has extended some mathematical work of Charles Dodgson, and by
... (more) |
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All the Universe in a Mason Jar (1977) |
|
| Joe Haldeman |
|
A humorous science fiction tale. John Taylor Taylor is a retired mathematician living in New Hampstead, Florida. One fine day, as he sits at his regular bar hangout reading his journals (“Nature, Communications... (more) |
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Altar of Eden (2009) |
|
| James Rollins |
|
"Fractals" is the buzz word in this adventure novel in which a veterinarian discovers seemingly mutated animals who were unwittingly brought back to the US by Black Market traders. Including vague references... (more) |
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Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer (2011) |
|
| Ken Liu |
|
One advantage of the human race having been uploaded into a virtual existence, in this post-singularity story, is that it offers a wide variety of decorating choices not normally available to those of... (more) |
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Anathem (2008) |
|
| Neal Stephenson |
|
This ambitious novel takes place on a world in which it is the theoretical scientists and mathematicians (rather than the theologians as on our planet) who have cloistered themselves in ascetic communes,... (more) |
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And He Built a Crooked House (1940) |
|
| Robert A. Heinlein |
|
A clever architect designs a house in the shape of the shadow of a
tesseract, but it collapses (through
the 4th dimension) when an earthquake shakes it into a more stable form (which takes up very... (more) |
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Aniara (1956) |
|
| Harry Martinson |
|
Aniara is considered one of the greatest works of Swedish author
Harry Martinson, 1974 Nobel Prize in Literature co-winner "for
writings that catch the dewdrop and reflect the cosmos". It is
an epic... (more) |
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Annals of Klepsis (1983) |
|
| R.A. Lafferty |
|
A wacky sci-fi adventure comedy featuring space pirates. There is not much math in the book, but the central plot revolves around a mathematical ``doomsday equation'' and the goal of preventing the horrible... (more) |
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The Anomaly [L'Anomalie] (2020) |
|
| Hervé Le Tellier |
|
This award-winning French novel offers an interesting twist on the now familiar science fiction trope of an airplane mysteriously re-appearing long after it has vanished. In this version, the international... (more) |
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Another Cock Tale (1975) |
|
| Chris Miller |
|
A tale which is best avoided, but documented here for completeness. It is an utterly tasteless, juvenile story designed to evoke titterings among teenagers. One could laugh if it were a funny dirty joke... (more) |
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Another New Math (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
A mathematician and his young daughter try to convince a school board to consider teaching advanced mathematics to elementary school children in this short story that appeared in the collection Reality... (more) |
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Antibodies (2000) |
|
| Charles Stross |
|
P vs NP is perhaps the greatest problem of theoretical computer science,
and has attracted attention of a range of mathematicians, from logic
to topology. It's one of the seven Clay Millennium Prize... (more) |
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The Appendix and the Spectacles (1928) |
|
| Miles J. Breuer (M.D.) |
|
There sometimes seems to be an unlimited supply of stories based on
the idea that we may be unaware of extra dimensions around us (just
like the inhabitants of Flatland). But, each
one has its own special features. Here we see it from a medical
perspective: what are the implications for surgery and malpractice?
Appears in Mathematical Magpie. (more) |
|
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Applied Mathematical Theology (2006) |
|
| Gregory Benford |
|
Benford, a physicist and science fiction author, wrote this piece about a message hidden in the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB) for the journal Nature's "Futures" column. It cites (fictional)... (more) |
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Approaching Perimelasma (1998) |
|
| Geoffrey A. Landis |
|
As part of a planned experiment, a man falls into a black hole and escapes through a wormhole. (Don't worry, it is only a backup copy of his mind on an artificial body specifically designed for this task.)... (more) |
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Arcadia (2016) |
|
| Iain Pears |
|
As this clever novel is intentionally a hodge-podge of genres, it is a bit difficult to describe. It involves a British spy brought back from retirement in the 1960s to find a mole, a mathematician in... (more) |
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Archive (Travelers, Season 3 Episode 8) (2018) |
|
| Ken Kabatoff / Brad Wright |
|
Math plays a major role in this episode of the Netflix series "Travelers". Following the show's usual format, the episode begins with a person in the present day going about his normal activity when... (more) |
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The Arrows of Time [Orthogonal Book Three] (2014) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
Egan's "Orthogonal Trilogy" concludes with the final part of the journey of the Peerless and its crew of scientists, mathematicians and engineers hoping to find a way to save their homeworld from destruction.... (more) |
|
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Art Thou Mathematics? (1978) |
|
| Charles Mobbs |
|
Short story (Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, October 1978 Vol. 98 No 10) concerning the very nature of mathematical discovery. It was later rewritten in the form of a play, which the author has... (more) |
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Artifact (1985) |
|
| Gregory Benford |
|
In this novel a team of scientists investigates a mysterious
archaeological find. It soon becomes apparent that more than just
archaelogy will be needed to understand it, and so a pair of physicists... (more) |
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As Above, So Below (2009) |
|
| Rudy Rucker |
|
An LSD of a story - in typical Rucker style - where a computer programmer working with the Mandelbrot set is visited upon by a living UFO in the form of the M-set; the UFO named Ma explains to him how... (more) |
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At Ocean (2016) |
|
| Oliver Serang |
|
Because she still makes discoveries with her own brain (unlike most scientists in the near future universe of At Ocean whose discoveries are all made by computers), Eun Kim is selected for a dangerous... (more) |
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Atomic Anna (2022) |
|
| Rachel Barenbaum |
|
I loved this plot from the moment I heard about it: A teenage math genius learns through comic books left for her by her mother that her grandmother who invented time travel needs her help solving some... (more) |
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The Atrocity Archives (2004) |
|
| Charles Stross |
|
"The Laundry" is a British spy organization which is responsible for suppressing certain dangerous math research. The occult implications of mathematics became clear with Alan Turing's paper "Phase Conjugate... (more) |
|
|
Aurora in Four Voices (1998) |
|
| Catherine Asaro |
|
Jato is trapped in Nightingale, a city in permanent
darkness, inhabited by mathematical artists who mostly ignore him. Soz
arrives to repair her ship, meets Jato, and finds... (more) |
|
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The Axiom of Choice (2011) |
|
| David W. Goldman |
|
A ``choose-your-own-adventure'' story about a guitarist who must face the consequences of his decision to take a plane ride that ended in disaster. A brief but very nice discussion of The Axiom of Choice... (more) |
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Axiom of Dreams (2023) |
|
| Arula Ratnakar |
|
An aspiring mathematician gets a brain implant designed to aid her research on Gödel Incompleteness in the hopes that it will help her get accepted into a PhD program. But, against the advice of... (more) |
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Babirusa (2022) |
|
| Arula Ratnakar |
|
One can briefly summarize this story without mentioning anything about mathematics: It concerns ethically questionable experiments conducted by a company called REMedy that link people through a “dream... (more) |
|
|
The Balloon Hoax (1844) |
|
| Edgar Allan Poe |
|
This is Poe's account of an alleged balloon trip to the
moon, in the spirit of the then infamous moon hoax. The
balloon rider describes the Earth as appearing concave when
5 miles up. Later,... (more) |
|
|
Barr’s Problem (1892) |
|
| Julian Hawthorne |
|
A cute, tall-tale about one Professor Brooks - presumably one of mathematics - his past student, Barr, and his 19-year old niece, Susan Wayne. The two youngsters are in love with each other but the... (more) |
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|
Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 (1982) |
|
| L. Ron Hubbard |
|
In the year 3000, the human race has nearly been destroyed by the Psychlos, an evil alien species who dominate thousands of planets in many universes. Although they view the few remaining humans as little... (more) |
|
|
The Bees of Knowledge (1975) |
|
| Barrington J. Bayley |
|
It's a story about a traveller marooned on a planet, part of which is populated by giant bees which collect the "nectar of knowledge" and make "honey of experience" out of that nectar. The story has a... (more) |
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Bellwether (1996) |
|
| Connie Willis |
|
A statistician studying the causes of fads and a chaos theorist studying the behavior of animals write a joint grant proposal for a project involving sheep. That may not sound like a winning book summary,... (more) |
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Beyond Infinity (2004) |
|
| Gregory Benford |
|
Cley is one of the few "original" humans left in a future where most of the characters are genetically enhanced. These engineered lifeforms, whether they are Supras (a highly advanced humanoid) or based... (more) |
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|
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Big Numbers (1990) |
|
| Alan Moore / Bill Sienkiewicz |
|
This comic book (written by Moore and illustrated by Sienkiewicz) was planned as a 12 issue series with a mathematics theme. Unfortunately, due to a lack of cooperation by the artist (and also a substitute... (more) |
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Bill, the Galactic Hero (1965) |
|
| Harry Harrison |
|
The famed parody of Asimov and Heinlein. Amongst other issues,
the book asks what happens to all the garbage from a one city
planet (a la Trantor from FOUNDATION)? It seems to be a losing
... (more) |
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Binti (2015) |
|
| Nnedi Okorafor |
|
Binti has left her village, left the planet Earth, and is on her way to study math at the galaxy's most prestigious university. When the ship is attacked by the fearsome alien race called the Meduse,... (more) |
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The Black Mirror (1983) |
|
| Eric Simon |
|
This story (available in "The Black Mirror and Other Stories"
and first published in the anthology, "Ways to Impossibility", 1983) is an interesting twist on the idea of one-sided surfaces. Based on... (more) |
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Blasphemy (2008) |
|
| Douglas Preston |
|
Douglas Preston's novel, “Blasphemy”, contains a few mathematical references that come up when scientists encounter “God” at the (hypothetical) world's largest particle collider,... (more) |
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The Blind Geometer (1987) |
|
| Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
This short novel lives up to its name: it really is about a blind
geometer! Carlos Oleg Nevsky was born blind and ``since 2043'' has
been a professor of mathematics at GWU. We get some interesting
discussion... (more) |
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Blinding Shadows (1934) |
|
| Donald Wandrei |
|
Story of a mathematics professor who theorizes that 4-dimensional objects should be casting 3-dimensional shadows and such shadows should be viewable by specially made mirrors. Dutifully, element number... (more) |
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BLIT (1988) |
|
| David Langford |
|
Goedelian incompleteness is encoded in graphic images that
kill viewers. A new kind of infoterrorism spreads.
Originally published in INTERZONE #25 Sept/Oct 1988.
See also a fake FAQ... (more) |
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Bloom (1998) |
|
| Wil McCarthy |
|
In between blooms of a deadly manmade fungus, the humans discuss cellular automata (especially Conway's Game of Life) and complexity theory.
Thanks to Rob Milson for suggesting this book.
(more) |
|
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Blowups Happen (1940) |
|
| Robert A. Heinlein |
|
A mathematician discovers that his formulas predict that an important
new power station poses an extremely grave risk to humanity, and he
must convince others of the danger.
reprinted in THE PAST... (more) |
|
|
Boltzmann's Ghost (1998) |
|
| Ken Wharton |
|
A physicist encounters an apparently crazy man who tries to convince him
that some beings experience time backwards. His intriguing explanation of
this phenomenon depends on theoretical physics, and... (more) |
|
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The Bones of Time (1996) |
|
| Kathleen Ann Goonan |
|
A young 21st century mathematician named Cen (short for Century) Kalakaua falls in love with a 19th century Hawaiian princess when they meet through an unusual temporal phenomenon. He becomes obsessed... (more) |
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|
Bonnie's Story: A Blonde's Guide to Mathematics (2013) |
|
| Janis Hill |
|
Bonnie wakes one morning to find an unusual stranger named Rogan taking pictures of street signs near her home. Despite the apparent implications of being "a blonde", Bonnie is sufficiently well-versed... (more) |
|
|
The Book of Sand (1975) |
|
| Jorge Luis Borges |
|
"The line is made up of an infinite number of points;
the plane of an infinite number of lines;
the volume of an infinite number of planes;
the hypervolume of an infinite number of volumes.
.... (more) |
|
|
The Book of Worlds (1929) |
|
| Miles J. Breuer |
|
Another story of 4-D from Miles Breuer, this time with Prof. Cosgrave who builds a "hyper-stereoscope" that can combine 3-dimensional views ("geometrical stereograms") from different angles into a 4-D... (more) |
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Border Guards (1999) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
In a virtual universe shaped like a 3-torus, free from disease and death, Jamil is easily depressed but enjoys playing a game of quantum soccer with his old friends, and one new friend. The new friend... (more) |
|
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Borzag and the Numerical Apocalypse (2006) |
|
| Jason Earls |
|
I must warn you that I am a trained mathematician, but NOT a trained expert on literature. Among other consequences, this means that I sometimes have trouble telling the difference between brilliant,... (more) |
|
|
The Boy Who Reversed Himself (1986) |
|
| William Sleator |
|
[William Sleator's The Boy Who
Reversed Himself is] a book catering to a preteen or early teen
audience about three high school students' adventures in 4-dimensional (and
higher) space. It includes... (more) |
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|
Brain Wave (1954) |
|
| Poul Anderson |
|
This debut novel from SF superstar Anderson explains that the human
intelligence is far more powerful than we have thus far seen. In fact,
once we escape from the effects of a force field that is limiting... (more) |
|
|
Brave New World (1932) |
|
| Aldous Huxley |
|
"Best known for its horrifying utopian vision of a future
where children are manufactured for their role in society,
the masses are kept happy with their feelies and drugs,
... (more) |
|
|
By a Fluke (1955) |
|
| Arthur Porges |
|
A liver fluke describes its life (from hatching from an egg to its final moments) to an alien who is recording it. As it turns out, these trematatode parasites are not as dumb as we think. In fact, they... (more) |
|
|
A Calculated Life (2013) |
|
| Anne Charnock |
|
This novel is about a brilliant mathematical modeler who works for big business finding correlations (such as that corporate reports tend to use nautical terminology when they are in trouble, even if they... (more) |
|
|
Calculated Risks (2021) |
|
| Seanan McGuire |
|
In this sequel, Sarah must use her mathematical skills to rescue her cousins and a big chunk of Iowa State University from the dimension to which she banished them in Imaginary Numbers.
The Price family,... (more) |
|
|
Calculating God (2000) |
|
| Robert J. Sawyer |
|
Though it is considerably less mathematical than Factoring Humanity, it holds together a bit better as a novel. Here, we encounter aliens who view the existence of god (a creator of the universe) as a... (more) |
|
|
The Calculating Stars: A Lady Astronaut Novel (2018) |
|
| Mary Robinette Kowal |
|
This novel, which is the first in a series of prequels by the author for her Hugo Award-winning story "The Lady Astronaut of Mars", is a sort of alternate history version of Hidden Figures.
In the world... (more) |
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Calculating the Speed of Heartbreak (2023) |
|
| Wendy Nikel |
|
Normally, I don't like works of mathematical fiction that use mathematical terminology and notation to discuss romantic relationships. They often involve groan-inducing formulae like "Pat + Sandy = Love".
However,... (more) |
|
|
The Call of Cthulhu (1928) |
|
| H.P. Lovecraft |
|
This is the most famous story by Lovecraft, which spawned it's own sub-genre and
RPG,
called the Cthulhu Mythos. It concerns the investigations of Prof. Francis
Wayland Thurston
as he investigates... (more) |
|
|
Cantor Trilogy (2015) |
|
| Harun Šiljak |
|
An intriguing short work of speculative fiction about a future in which nearly all mathematics research is conducted by computers. In fact, in the story, only one journal (The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics),... (more) |
|
|
Cantor's War (1974) |
|
| Christopher Anvil |
|
In my opinion, this story is slanderous and the author should be ashamed.
The plot involves a science fiction scenario in which the human military is battling aliens in "tau space". Whenever we send... (more) |
|
|
Cap and Gown (2011) |
|
| Eric Flint |
|
Richard Leamington has an impact on mathematics at Cambridge University in the 17th Century despite his multiple sclerosis. Although Leamington himself is a fictional character, many of the other characters... (more) |
|
|
The Captured Cross-Section (1929) |
|
| Miles J. Breuer (M.D.) |
|
Another "extra dimensions" story, with the twist of our hero having to save his fiance (also a mathematician) from terrifying dangers. There is some nonsense at the beginning about rotations and a count... (more) |
|
|
Cascade Point (1983) |
|
| Timothy Zahn |
|
"Cascade Point" by Timothy Zahn (1983, won the 1984 Hugo award) contains
fictionalized mathematical analysis of higher-order dimensions of
space/time.
The novel concerns future space travel whereby... (more) |
|
|
A Catastrophe Machine (2004) |
|
| Carter Scholz |
|
A well-written, vaguely surrealistic story loosely based on the real mathematical field of catastrophe theory and set within the context of the Vietnam War.
The title is taken from an invention of mathematician... (more) |
|
|
Catch the Lightning [Lightning Strikes Vols. I-II] (1997) |
|
| Catherine Asaro |
|
A 17 year-old girl from Los Angeles finds herself in a sexual/romantic relationship with a not-quite-human time-traveller in this book which continues the author's "Skolian saga".
The story is actually... (more) |
|
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|
|
Children of Dune (1976) |
|
| Frank Herbert |
|
This third novel in the "Dune" series (which was also made into a TV miniseries) contains a wonderful (but rather brief and not very significant) bit of fictional mathematics. The following quotation... (more) |
|
|
Children of Time (2015) |
|
| Adrian Tchaikovsky |
|
The first book of the Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky (which is all that I have read) heavily features mathematics. In it, a brilliant but arrogant scientist's experiment to rapidly evolve... (more) |
|
|
The Circle of Zero (1936) |
|
| Stanley G. Weinbaum |
|
Thanks to Vijay Fafat for pointing out this story (with only a little math in it). A character speculates that the laws of probability predict that anything will happen in an infinite amount of time,... (more) |
|
|
The Circumference of the World (2023) |
|
| Lavie Tidhar |
|
This genre-bending meta-fictional novel concerns a mysterious book called "Lode Stars" by a pulp science fiction author who founded a religion. The main tenets of that religion are that the universe is... (more) |
|
|
Clockwork (1953) |
|
| Leslie Bigelow |
|
A very satisfying tale which blends some hand-waving magic realism and mathematics to create a vision of the fantastic.
Noah Griffenhoek is professor of physics, and the narrator, Patrick Lanson,... (more) |
|
|
The Clockwork Rocket [Orthogonal Book One] (2011) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
Egan's "Orthogonal Trilogy" explains how the Peerless and its crew of scientists, mathematicians and engineers was launched in the hope if find a way to save their homeworld from destruction. A major... (more) |
|
|
Cocoon of Terror (2008) |
|
| Jason Earls |
|
The protagonist in the latest novel by Jason Earls spends his time hunting down the evil and semi-mystical artist Zelian, and much of his spare time finding integers with interesting aesthetic and number... (more) |
|
|
The Coincidence Engine (2011) |
|
| Sam Leith |
|
A tongue-in-cheek, easy-read, quite enjoyable romp of a story about a reclusive mathematician named “Bancharski”, a play on the names of mathematicians Banach and Tarski (unfortunately, Banach-Tarski... (more) |
|
|
The Cold Equations (1954) |
|
| Tom Godwin |
|
This classic science fiction story is a favorite of English teachers
because, even after all of these years, it has the ability to get the
attention of and provoke discussion amongst otherwise apathetic... (more) |
|
|
Conceiving Ada (1997) |
|
| Lynn Hershman-Leeson
|
|
Bizarre, low-budget film in which a female computer programmer from the 20th century accesses the memories of Ada Lovelace, the 19th century mathematician and daughter of the poet Lord Byron. The film... (more) |
|
|
Conservation of Probability (1994) |
|
| Brook West |
|
The story, “Null-P.” by William Tenn speaks of the perfectly average man, right at the center of the population bell-curve. In “Conservation of Probability”, Brook West explores the other end,... (more) |
|
|
Contact (1985) |
|
| Carl Sagan |
|
This is a fantastic novel; don't skip it just because you saw the
movie. Mathematics plays an important role in the book, much more so
than in the film. In both, Ellie Arroway detects a message from... (more) |
|
|
Context (2005) |
|
| John Meaney |
|
This is the second book in the Nulapeiron Sequence by John Meaney. The protagonist is still Tom Corcorigan, who in the first novel rose from slavery to royalty in part because of his "logosophical" (read... (more) |
|
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|
|
Count to a Trillion (2011) |
|
| John C. Wright |
|
A team of the world's top mathematicians is sent to examine an alien artifact which seems to have a tremendous amount of knowledge "written" on it. (I've put "written" in quotes because not only is the... (more) |
|
|
The Crazy Mathematician (1964) |
|
| Ralph Sylvester Underwood |
|
Prof. Rumpel, a "genius touched by madness - a world sensation in the fields of mathematics, physics, astronomy - you name it", considers matter and spacetime to be infinitely divisible. Just like there... (more) |
|
|
Critical Point (2020) |
|
| S.L. Huang |
|
This is the third novel featuring Cas Russell, a private detective with superhuman mathematical abilities that allow her to fight with remarkable precision, and to quickly survey a crime scene.
There... (more) |
|
|
Cryptonomicon (1998) |
|
| Neal Stephenson |
|
This "cult" novel of mathematics, computer science, espionage and
warfare follows a mathematician through World War II and his grandson
through the creation of a (less than ordinary) silicon valley start-up
company.... (more) |
|
|
Cube (1997) |
|
| Vincenzo Natali (Director) |
|
This [film] concerns the attempt of six individuals to escape from a vast network
of interlocking cubes, each room, and each wall, floor and ceiling
identical. The rooms vary in colour. Some are harmless;... (more) |
|
|
The Cube Root of Conquest (1948) |
|
| Rog Phillips |
|
An evil dictator's plan to destroy and conquer the world is based on the
work of one of his scientists, which allows travel into complex components
of time. In order to do this, one is required to solve... (more) |
|
|
The Cubist and the Madman (1991) |
|
| Robert Metzger |
|
This is one whacked-out ride of a story, very well written for its purpose, completely disorienting in its mood and descriptions, and achieving its purpose the way a cubist painting would. Rather than... (more) |
|
|
The Curve of the Snowflake (1956) |
|
| William Grey Walter |
|
A beautiful and brilliant woman organizes a team of scientists (and a mathematician) who together make fusion energy efficient and invent a flying submarine...and perhaps a time-machine as well. When... (more) |
|
|
Cyberchase (2002) |
|
| Educational Broadcasting Corporation |
|
Three kids go inside "cyberspace" to help the maternal Mother Board
fight the evil Hacker. Each episode, in addition to learning about
computers, the kids have to develop their mathematical skills to... (more) |
|
|
The Cyberiad (1967) |
|
| Stanislaw Lem |
|
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"... (more) |
|
|
Dalrymple’s Equation (1956) |
|
| Paul Fairman |
|
A tall tale about an alien “from Arva Majoris [...] a planet in a galaxy beyond the conception of [humanity’s] most brilliant minds.” . He’s taken on the name, “Tennyson Dalrymple” and uses... (more) |
|
|
The Dangerous Dimension (1938) |
|
| L. Ron Hubbard |
|
"The Dangerous Dimension" is L. Ron Hubbard's first science
fiction story, written at editor F Orlin Tremaine's request
for something light, easy-reading, and humorous. In the
story, Professor Henry... (more) |
|
|
Dante Dreams (1998) |
|
| Stephen Baxter |
|
There is an interpretation of Dante's "Divine Comedy" as a mystical description of the universe as a hypersphere (see "Dante and the 3-sphere"
American Journal of Physics -- December 1979 -- Volume... (more) |
|
|
Dark as Day (2002) |
|
| Charles Sheffield |
|
Alex Ligon, though unbelievably rich, chooses to work voluntarily at a government
agency where his predictive models for the future of the human race (based,
he claims, on the principles of statistical... (more) |
|
|
Dark Integers (2007) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
The ``cold war'' between this universe with our mathematical laws and a bordering universe with different ones (which began in "Luminous") heats up when the numerical experiments of a mathematical physicist... (more) |
|
|
The Dark Side of the Sun (1976) |
|
| Terry Pratchett |
|
This humorous science fiction novel tells the tale of Dom Salabos, who believes he is destined to become "Chairman of the Board of Widdershins and heir to riches untold", but his allies familiar with p-math... (more) |
|
|
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) |
|
| Robert Wise (director) / Harry Bates (story) / Edmund H. North |
|
One must wonder how aliens might communicate with humans when and if they arrive on Earth. In the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, the extraterrestrial Klaatu (Michael Rennie) introduces himself... (more) |
|
|
A Deadly Medley of Smedley (2003) |
|
| Feargus Gwynplaine MacIntyre |
|
Paradox Patrol officer Julie Anne Callender, with the help of her brother
Gregorian and her uncle Newgate, track down yet again the timecrime master
of evil Smedley Faversham (and atrocious punmeister)... (more) |
|
|
Dear Abbey (2003) |
|
| Terry Bisson |
|
This novel, which has not received many good reviews and appears only to have been published in Britain, involves a math professor who is a terrorist for environmentalist causes. (That the author chose... (more) |
|
|
Death Qualified: A Mystery of Chaos (1992) |
|
| Kate Willhelm |
|
The book only becomes science fiction towards the end. For most of it, it follows the format of a mystery in which there are several murders (which remain mysterious to the reader until near to the end)... (more) |
|
|
Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World (1666) |
|
| Margaret Cavendish |
|
Although there is only a short discussion of mathematics, I had to include it because it is just too interesting that this is not only one of the oldest science-fiction stories but moreover the fact that... (more) |
|
|
Deterministic Republic (2021) |
|
| Kris H. Green |
|
The January 2021 issue of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics includes the article Aligning Political Options and Aggregated Personal Opinions on the Issues by Kris Green which introduces an alternative... (more) |
|
|
The Devil You Don't (1970) |
|
| Keith Laumer |
|
The devil (who is not such a bad guy after all) seeks help from a quantum physics expert to fight off some aliens (who are not so evil either) that happen to disrupt the "Randomness Field". This disruption... (more) |
|
|
The Devious Weapon (1949) |
|
| M. C. Pease |
|
This is a clever game-theoretic story about a man outwitting a formidable computing machine by doing almost nothing.
Prince Kallin is the leader of the “League of Border States”, of which “the... (more) |
|
|
The Devouring Tide (1944) |
|
| John Russell Fearn (under the pseudonym Polton Cross) |
|
Another horridly written story by JRF, this time about an all-consuming, universe-destroying frontier of “non-spacetime” dubbed “Black Infinity”, a shock wave from the original... (more) |
|
|
Diabologic (1955) |
|
| Eric Frank Russell |
|
Tagline: “One way to keep a man from getting anywhere is to give him a toy—a nonsense puzzle —that he can’t put down. It’s much more effective than trying to forcibly hold him!”
This is... (more) |
|
|
Diamond Dogs (2001) |
|
| Alastair Reynolds |
|
This novella by a trained astrophysicist who has worked for the European Space Agency features an alien designed "death trap" that challenges people with difficult mathematical puzzles. In an interview,... (more) |
|
|
Diaspora (1998) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
"This is the only science-fiction book I have ever
read to define the term fiber bundle."
said contributor David Moews of this book. The same for me, though I was
disappointed to see that it was... (more) |
|
|
Dichronauts (2017) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
The protagonist(s) in this story are symbiotic creatures who can only see in all directions when they work together because the laws of physics in their world have strange implications for the way that... (more) |
|
|
The Difference Engine (1991) |
|
| William Gibson / Bruce Sterling |
|
Two of the innovators of the cyberpunk novel -- famous for showing how messed up the future will be because of technology -- turn everything around and show us instead how great the past would have been... (more) |
|
|
Dimensional Analysis and Mr Fortescue (1965) |
|
| Eric St. Clair |
|
A fairly silly story typical of pulp magazines. Mr. Fortescue wanted to to build a funhouse (“House of Fun, Magic, and Mystery”) in his town. Why? Read with an eye-roll:
“This town needed... (more) |
|
|
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) |
|
| Douglas Adams |
|
Douglas Adams is best known for his wacky Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy series. But his two Dirk Gently novels, while
maintaining Adams' characteristic high wackiness, also carry
... (more) |
|
|
The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine (2017) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
This story is funnier and less mathematical than most of Greg Egan's writing. It concerns the spontaneous evolution of artificial intelligence within the global computer network. But, rather than destroying... (more) |
|
|
Dispel Illusion (2019) |
|
| Mark Lawrence |
|
This third book in the "Impossible Times" series continues telling the story of math prodigy Nick Hayes and the bizarre time loop he experiences/causes. Many of the chapters in this book take place in... (more) |
|
|
The Disposessed (1974) |
|
| Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
A utopian novel in which theories of time in mathematical physics ("chronotopology", "sequency and simultaneity", "general temporal theories") play an important role.
.
In brief, it is a gem of... (more) |
|
|
Distances (2008) |
|
| Vandana Singh |
|
Most members of Anasunya's species have "a gift". Since she has a gift of mathematics, she leaves her aquatic home and begins working at the
Temple of Mathematical Arts. She has a gift that allows... (more) |
|
|
Distress (1995) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
My friends and I are all in agreement on this one: this book starts
out great (at a mathematical physics conference where people are
talking about the latest theories of quantum gravity) but then it
degenerates... (more) |
|
|
Divergence (2007) |
|
| Tony Ballantyne |
|
This is the third novel of a trilogy that began with RECURSION and
CAPACITY. Set in the 23rd century, the nannying of humanity by
government and computers is the cause of some discomfort and rebellion.
Along... (more) |
|
|
Doctor Who (Episode: Logopolis) (1981) |
|
| Christopher Bidmead |
|
This episode of the popular
BBC show "Doctor Who" (most famously the last episode featuring the fourth Doctor as played by Tom Baker) involves a city of whispering mathematicians
whose computations keep... (more) |
|
|
Doctor Who: The Algebra of Ice (2004) |
|
| Lloyd Rose (pseudonym of Sarah Tonyn) |
|
Lloyd Rose (pen name for Sarah Tonyn) has a “Doctor Who” book called “The Algebra of Ice”. It describes the attempted invasion of our universe by mathematical beings from another... (more) |
|
|
Doctor Who: The Turing Test (2000) |
|
| Paul Leonard |
|
Mathematician Alan Turing appears as a primary character in this unusual Doctor Who novel, and narrates the first third of it. (The other two thirds are narrated by authors Graham Greene and Joseph Heller... (more) |
|
|
Doing our Babbage (1992) |
|
| Ira Slobodien |
|
The mind of 19th century mathematician Charles Babbage is brought back to life in electronic/mechanical form, becomes involved in a kinky "love rectangle" with the three scientists responsible (two women... (more) |
|
|
The Doors of Eden (2020) |
|
| Adrian Tchaikovsky |
|
A handful of inhabitants of Earths with different evolutionary histories find themselves either working together to save their worlds as the multi-verse collapses. The characters include a cryptid-hunting... (more) |
|
|
Dragon's Egg (1980) |
|
| Robert L. Forward |
|
[In this science fiction novel],
the crew of the first spaceship to ever visit a neutron star discover that the star is inhabited by a race - the Cheela - whose metabolism is based on nuclear reactions... (more) |
|
|
The Dreams in the Witch-House (1933) |
|
| H.P. Lovecraft |
|
In this story, Walter Gilman, a mathematics graduate student at Miskatonic
University
in Arkham, Mass, rents a room in the famed haunted "Witch House" of Keziah
Mason,
a witch who legend says escaped... (more) |
|
|
Drode's Equations (1981) |
|
| Richard Grant |
|
When this story takes place, the fictional "Drode's Equations" have been
lost for so long that they have become practically mythological. And so
the historian protagonist is surprised to find them in... (more) |
|
|
Drop (2008) |
|
| Lisa Papademitriou |
|
A mathematically talented high school student uses what appears to be psychic powers to beat the casinos in this novel for young adults. However, with the help of a math professor she begins to realize... (more) |
|
|
Drunkard's Walk (1960) |
|
| Frederik Pohl |
|
A number theorist is suffering from frequent and
inexplicable suicide attempts, the latest victim of a small epidemic among
academia. In between lectures on Pascal's triangle and the binomial
theorem... (more) |
|
|
Dude, can you count? (2010) |
|
| Christian Constanda |
|
Utilizing the entertaining contrivance of an extraterrestrial who visits human math conferences to evaluate our intelligence, Constanda tells us what he thinks is wrong with math education today. Following... (more) |
|
|
Eifelheim (2006) |
|
| Michael Flynn |
|
In this award winning science fiction novel, Tom and Sharon have a lot in common. They share an apartment, both use sophisticated mathematics in their research, and both become completely obsessed with... (more) |
|
|
The Eighth Room (1989) |
|
| Stephen Baxter |
|
The story forms part of the Xeelee-sequence of stories and novels. In far distant future, the Xeelee decide to lock away the human race in a world hidden in hyperspace (as the pale, atavistic remnants... (more) |
|
|
The Einstein See-Saw (1932) |
|
| Miles J. Breuer |
|
This is another of the hyperspace stories by Miles Breuer. This time, a mathematical physicist discovers that mattter can be tossed around in and out of space(-time) [see his papers, "A Preliminary Report... (more) |
|
|
Emmy's Time (2018) |
|
| Anthony Bonato |
|
The main story-line is quite reminiscent of the pulp era, with its aw-shucks use of "recently discovered temporal fields" and "earth is about to be destroyed unless one brilliant mathematician can solve... (more) |
|
|
Empire of the Ants (1991) |
|
| Bernard Werber |
|
This is a fascinating first novel. Published in France under the title "Les Fourmis" in 1991 and translated into English as "Empire of the Ants" (not to be confused with the H G Wells story
or movie... (more) |
|
|
End of Days (2011) |
|
| Eric Walters |
|
Although it appears to the world as if many of the leading scientists and mathematicians coincidentally died during the same year, what actually happened to them in this YA novel is that they were kidnapped... (more) |
|
|
The End of Mr. Y (2006) |
|
| Scarlett Thomas |
|
After her thesis advisor disappears, a graduate students studying "thought experiments" in science and in fiction discovers a copy of the rare (and supposedly cursed) book "The End of Mr. Y". Following... (more) |
|
|
Eon (1985) |
|
| Greg Bear |
|
Its been quite a while since I read this, but some info is better than none!
Its rather like "Rama" - a big asteroid appears over the earth in the near future.
It was obviously made to be inhabited... (more) |
|
|
An Episode of Flatland (1907) |
|
| Charles H. Hinton |
|
Hinton, whose biography is a
little too weird for me to believe and whose essays on the fourth dimension
(see for example A New
Era of Thought) leave me wondering how much he really believed that the
fourth... (more) |
|
|
The Equationist (2018) |
|
| J. D. Moyer |
|
An odd but mathematically gifted child named Niall understands the people around him by identifying their central "equation".
I have put the word in quotes because it seems that what he is really thinking... (more) |
|
|
Equations of Life (2011) |
|
| Simon Morden |
|
To escape from his life in organized crime, the protagonist creates a fake identity as a physics student named Samuil Petrovich. Though he has made an incredible discovery in theoretical physics, Petrovich... (more) |
|
|
The Eternal Flame [Orthogonal Book Two] (2012) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
This second novel in Egan's "Orthogonal Trilogy" continues to follow the scientific and mathematical discoveries of creatures on a space ship hoping to find a way to save their home world. That plot and... (more) |
|
|
The Eternal Wanderer (1936) |
|
| Nathan Schachner |
|
A magnificently pulpy story of one man, Cliff Haven's, struggle against the tyranny of a Martian who enslaves the inner planets of the solar system. As a punishment, Cliff is sentenced to become “the... (more) |
|
|
The Ethical Equations (1945) |
|
| Murray Leinster |
|
Mathematics is invoked several times to formalize `what goes
round, comes around' as if it were a law of nature. 100% hokey.
The only thing worse than the bad math is the bad science.
... (more) |
|
|
Euler's Equation (2019) |
|
| Neil Hudson |
|
There are certain things in life which strike people as proof of existence of a transcendent power, a mystical presence of something beyond the mundane laws of the sciences. To some, Euler’s equation... (more) |
|
|
Eve Times Four (1960) |
|
| Poul Anderson |
|
An old "pulp" SF story about an accident which strands some space travelers on a deserted but habitable planet. One of them is a female mathematician:
Teresina was of the tall and willowy persuasion,... (more) |
|
|
Eversion (2022) |
|
| Alastair Reynolds |
|
One supporting character in this science fiction novel is a young mathematician whose solution to a problem involving sphere eversion is essential to the success of the mission. But, as it is not clear... (more) |
|
|
The Exception (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
Written in the form of a dialogue between a man in a nursing home and his grandchild, this short story describes an undergraduate research project that produces a surprising answer to one of the most famous... (more) |
|
|
Exordia (2024) |
|
| Seth Dickson |
|
Seth Dickinson's Exordia (Jan 2024) takes as one of its central conceits the notion that the physical universe is an expression of mathematical reality, and has as one of its central characters a Chinese... (more) |
|
|
The Exploration of Space (1972) |
|
| Barrington J. Bayley |
|
The author has used - as in some of his other stories like "The problem of Morley's Emission" - a story format to lay out some of his philosophical speculations, in this instance about the nature of... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Eye of the Beholder (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
Shortly after a stunning success in her research, personal tragedy forces a math professor to change careers and begin work at the NSA where her work on cryptography involves some difficult ethical decisions.... (more) |
|
|
The Face of the Waters (1991) |
|
| Robert Silverberg |
|
The novel is set on a water-logged planet called “Hydros”, populated by artificial islands floating on a planet-spanning ocean. A few humans on one of the islands end up offending the local... (more) |
|
|
Factoring Humanity (1998) |
|
| Robert J. Sawyer |
|
There is certainly a lot of deep mathematics discussed in this `first
contact' novel, as well as a good deal of controversial physics and
psychology. Still, in the end, I did not find it especially
satisfying.... (more) |
|
|
The Fairy Chessmen (1951) |
|
| Henry Kuttner |
|
A mathematician whose research involves a type of chess played with
variable rules ("fairy chess") is the only one able to solve an "equation
from the future" in which the constants are treated as variables... (more) |
|
|
The Fatal Equation (1933) |
|
| Arthur Strangeland |
|
This is a very well-crafted murder mystery executed quite ingeniously. A mathematical physicist - Jan Friede - sets up a system of 20+ equations which eliminate the time variable from Einstein's equations... (more) |
|
|
Fatous Staub (1991) |
|
| Christian Mähr |
|
This surrealistic science fiction novel about parallel worlds, computers, and the mathematics of Pierre Fatou (who laid the foundations for the theory of fractals) has appeared only in German. Since I... (more) |
|
|
The Fear Index (2011) |
|
| Robert Harris |
|
Dr. Alex Hoffmann is an anti-social billionaire whose investment firm uses what he calls "Autonomous Machine Reasoning" (AMR) to make spectacular profits based on the Volatility Index (VIX), from which... (more) |
|
|
The Feeling of Power (1957) |
|
| Isaac Asimov |
|
An advanced society rediscovers the joys
of multipying numbers BY HAND, a forgotten art. It's a
gem.
The
author probably did not realize how quickly the premise of this story
(people so dependent... (more) |
|
|
Feigenbaum Number (1995) |
|
| Nancy Kress |
|
A postdoc who perceives reality different than other people (he sees something like the Platonic ideals people ought to be) works with a professor on combining chaos theory with particle physics. I'm... (more) |
|
|
Fermat's Lost Theorem (1994) |
|
| Jerry Oltion |
|
This is a neat little story which plays on the fancy that one has found a very simple proof for Fermat's last theorem...if only one can write it down before the epiphany passes. A young mathematician... (more) |
|
|
The Fermata (1994) |
|
| Nicholson Baker |
|
This book is certainly more about sex than it is about mathematics. However, I find the one mathematical passage in it so hilarious that I have to include it here.
The premise of the book is that the... (more) |
|
|
The Fifth-Dimension Catapult (1931) |
|
| Murray Leinster |
|
This short novel, originally published in the January 1931 ASTOUNDING,
and republished by Damon Knight in SCIENCE FICTION OF THE 30'S (1975),
involves a mathematical physicist whose theories get applied... (more) |
|
|
Fifty Million Monkeys (1943) |
|
| Raymond F. Jones |
|
The story is set sometime around 12,000 AD. The use of interstellar rockets over 15 years creates a "polarization of space" which leads to a "Pioneer anomaly"-like deviations in flight paths of spacecraft.... (more) |
|
|
Fillet of Man (1995) |
|
| Eliot Fintushel |
|
A first contact short short. Prime numbers are the way humans
and the aliens recognize each other. And the alien spaceship
"looked like a topologist's diagram of an exploded torus".
Published in ASIMOV'S (Sept 95) pp112-115.
(more) |
|
|
Finity (1999) |
|
| John Barnes |
|
A madcap science fiction adventure involving much bouncing between alternate realities, with vague references to quantum physics and mathematics.
The narrator is an astronomer who has developed a mathematical... (more) |
|
|
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884) |
|
| Edwin Abbott Abbott |
|
This is the classic example of mathematical fiction in which
the author helps us to think about the meaning of "dimension" through
fictional example: a visit to a world with only two spatial
dimensions.... (more) |
|
|
The Flight of the Dragonfly (aka Rocheworld) (1984) |
|
| Robert L. Forward |
|
A crew of humans travel to a distant planet to meet the intelligent
lifeform we have discovered there. They turn out to be a race largely
interested in mathematical problems (sounds very reasonable... (more) |
|
|
The Flight That Disappeared (1961) |
|
| Reginald Le Borg (Director) |
|
An unsuspecting mathematician and some scientists are taken to another dimension where they stand trial for their involvement in the creation of horrible weapons. Perhaps during the Cold War and before... (more) |
|
|
Flower Arrangement (1959) |
|
| Rosel George Brown |
|
I kept smiling throughout this story, which weaves in mathematics without really speaking about it overtly, and at the same time, capturing sardonic commentary about treatment of women in a male-centric... (more) |
|
|
Forbidden Knowledge (1987) |
|
| Kathryn Cramer |
|
Mathematical statements can sound pretty strange, practically humorous, when you don't know the technical definitions of the terms. This somewhat frightening story has such a statement as its punchline. Specifically, it all builds up to a quote from Irving Kaplansky's (more) |
|
|
La formule: (A story of fourth dimension) (1996) |
|
| Jean Ray |
|
A very short story from the ultramundane realm, relying on the theme that certain types of mathematical knowledge open up portals to higher dimensions.
A mathematical physicist, Lenglade, lives up high... (more) |
|
|
Foundation (1951) |
|
| Isaac Asimov |
|
In this book and its prequels/sequels, we see humanity guided by the
work of fictional "mathematician, Hari Seldon, who works out the rules
of psychohistory and makes a secret chart that the humankind... (more) |
|
|
Four Brands of Impossible (1964) |
|
| Norman Kagan |
|
In the futuristic 1980's, a math student graduates from multiversity and gets a job with a megacorporation which is trying to do the impossible, literally. Along with his friends (a psychologist and an... (more) |
|
|
The Four-Color Problem (1971) |
|
| Barrington J. Bayley |
|
A story written in a psychedelic, stream-of-consciousness style a la William S. Burroughs concerning the discovery of previously unknown countries on the Earth whose existence provides a counter-example... (more) |
|
|
The Fourth Dynasty (1936) |
|
| R.R. Winterbotham |
|
A confused story of a couple (Victor and Georgiana) who go into
cryogenic suspended animation for a million and a half years and wake
up in the era of the Fourth Dynasty, the age of the Kora (first... (more) |
|
|
The Fourth-Dimensional Demonstrator (1935) |
|
| Murray Leinster |
|
Uses the fourth dimension as geewhiz terminology to explain
a matter duplicator/unduplicator. Includes a tesseract.
But if you ignore the story's explanation involving time as
... (more) |
|
|
Fractal Mode (1992) |
|
| Piers Anthony |
|
Here, Anthony's usual blend of fantasy and science fiction takes us to an alternate universe where the geometry of worlds themselves take on the form of the Mandelbrot set. Unfortunately, he spends a... (more) |
|
|
Freemium (2021) |
|
| Louis Evans |
|
A man whose ethically questionable internet scheme made him a billionaire gets even more rich and powerful when unknown aliens provide him with factorizations of large integers and predictions of the stock... (more) |
|
|
The Fringe (Episode: The Equation) (2008) |
|
| J.R. Orci (Screenplay) / David H. Goodman (Screenplay) |
|
The ``Fringe Team'' (an FBI agent, a mad scientist and his son) investigate a series of kidnappings in which the victim is hypnotized with red and green lights. In each case, the victim was about to... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Funes el Memorioso [Funes, His Memory] (1942) |
|
| Jorge Luis Borges |
|
Borges' short story piece, “Funes, His Memory' (or in other translations, “Funes, The Memorious”) discusses the phenomenal memory of an acquaintance, Ireneo Funes. Funes, at age nineteen,... (more) |
|
|
Futility (1929) |
|
| Sterner St. Paul Meek (S.P. Meek) |
|
There is an old folk story, “The Appointment in Samarra”, in which a man sees Death in a market in Baghdad and flees to Samarra to escape its clutches, only to find that his appointment with Death... (more) |
|
|
Futurama (Episode: 2-D Blacktop) (2013) |
|
| Michael Rowe (writer) / Raymie Muzquiz (director) |
|
In the episode 2-D Blacktop from Futurama's tenth season, Professor Farnsworth invents a device that looks like a tesseract and takes his "hot rod" into the fourth dimension. When he collides with Leela's... (more) |
|
|
Futurama (Episode: The Prisoner of Benda) (2011) |
|
| Ken Keeler (writer) / Stephen Sandoval (director) |
|
Although many episodes contain mathematical "in jokes", from the point of view of mathematical fiction, the most notable episode of Futurama was "The Prisoner of Benda" (2011). In that episode, a machine... (more) |
|
|
The Future Engine (1995) |
|
| Byron Tetrick |
|
Charles Babbage's son calls on Sherlock Holmes to investigate the
theft of the Analytic Engine from its warehouse. The son gives a
description of its importance to mathematical calculations. But
it's his mention of the role of the binomial theorem in its working
that arouses Holmes's interest.
Published in Mike Resnick and M H Greenberg (eds) SHERLOCK HOLMES IN ORBIT.
(more) |
|
|
FYI (1961) |
|
| James Blish |
|
This story contains a brief explanation of the transfinite cardinals
and their arithmetic as part of a scary bit of science fiction. Why,
you may ask (and the character in the story does), do the transfinite
cardinals... (more) |
|
|
Gödel's Doom (1985) |
|
| George Zebrowski |
|
What if Gödel was wrong? That is the question asked in this well
written but very confused short story. The characters in this story
decide to test Gödel's theorem by running a computer
program... (more) |
|
|
The Galactic Circle (1935) |
|
| Jack Williamson |
|
Prof. Thorn Jarvis, the Einstein-figure of the story, has built a ship called Infiniterra to undertake “possibly the greatest scientific expedition of history.”
This uranium-powered ship increases... (more) |
|
|
Galactic Pot-Healer (1969) |
|
| Philip K. Dick |
|
Joe Fernwright, mender of broken pottery in some future Earth
society, but bored out of his mind after months without any pots
to fix, accepts a mysterious invitation to a far planet where... (more) |
|
|
Galactic Rapture (2000) |
|
| Tom Flynn |
|
On a future Earth whose major export to other planets is the Christian religion, mathematician Fram Galbior is a hero for his formula which allows the prediction of the appearance of ``Tuezi''. These... (more) |
|
|
Gallactic Alliance - Translight! (2009) |
|
| Doug Farren |
|
A human scientist invents a new branch of mathematics, "continuum calculus", as the basis for a stardrive. At one point, he compares his mathematical constructions with those of an alien species who have... (more) |
|
|
A Game of Consequences (1998) |
|
| David Langford |
|
Two reckless researchers at "The Mathematics Institute" undertake dangerous "quantum" research based on mathematical mumbo-jumbo like "translating her mathematical intuitions into appropriate quasi-shapes and pseudo-angles for Ranjit's algorithmic probes".
First published in Starlight 2 (1998) edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden.
(more) |
|
|
The Ganymede Club (1995) |
|
| Charles Sheffield |
|
A group of space explorers attempt to protect the secret that they are no longer aging in this well written SF novel. Although these (essentially) immortal characters are not especially mathematical,... (more) |
|
|
The Gates of Heaven (1984) |
|
| Paul Preuss |
|
The plot concerns a mathematician whose career has been monotone decreasing. But he comes alive again when a SETI project finds a human message coming from 12 light years away. It seems somebody must have fallen into something like a black hole and our hero tries to understand what happened.
(more) |
|
|
Genghis Khan and 888 (2005) |
|
| Jason Earls |
|
As one might guess from the title of the literary journal in which it was published ("Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens #4"), this story is a bit strange. According to the author, it is absurdist... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Georgia on My Mind (1995) |
|
| Charles Sheffield |
|
The story has to do with Babbage's
Analytical Engine and a remote region of Antarctica (the "Georgia"
of the title). The mathematics bit, aside from Babbage, consists
of a nonlinear optimization... (more) |
|
|
Getaway from Getawehi (1969) |
|
| Colin Kapp |
|
Colin Kapp has written a few stories which have some good, hard SF mixed up with highly tongue-in-cheek, believable flights of fancy. The present story is set on the single planet, Getawehi, of a rogue... (more) |
|
|
Ghost Days (2013) |
|
| Ken Liu |
|
This short story begins with a very short computer program that computes the Fibonacci numbers which a young student is learning in school. The teacher is one of the human crew of a space ship and the... (more) |
|
|
The Ghost from the Grand Banks (1990) |
|
| Arthur C. Clarke |
|
The topics change
from the Titanic to a giant octopus but a central one is the
Mandelbrot set. We are introduced to mathematician-cum-computer
wizard Edith Craig who invents software to fix the Y2K... (more) |
|
|
The Gift of Numbers (1958) |
|
| Alan Nourse |
|
A mild story about an accounting book-keeper, Avery Mearns, who runs into a stranger called, “The Colonel” at the local bar. “The Colonel had a way with numbers like no other guy around. It was... (more) |
|
|
The Gimatria of Pi (2004) |
|
| Lavie Tidhar |
|
More ``numerology'' than mathematics, this short story is based on the idea that the decimal expansion of π has predictive value. For example, it is portrayed as predicting the assassination of Yitzhak... (more) |
|
|
The Girl with the Celestial Limb (1990) |
|
| Pauline Melville |
|
Although recognized as mathematically talented in school, Jane Cole hid from all things intellectual after having a frightening epiphany regarding infinity. Math, however, seemingly exacts its revenge... (more) |
|
|
Global Dawn (2007) |
|
| Deborah Gelbard |
|
Geometry, especially the notion of the "tilted square", plays a mathematical as well as a spiritual role in the ambitious project undertaken in this novel. According to the author, "The protagonist aims... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Glory (2007) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
The story talks about a xenomathematician's quest to understand hieroglyphic tablets on an alien planet containing the mathematical knowledge of an extinct civilization. The extinct aliens had apparently... (more) |
|
|
The God Patent (2009) |
|
| Ransom Stephens |
|
After his life falls apart, an engineer tries to revive a collaboration with the fundamentalist Christian with whom he once wrote two patents based on the Bible. While he viewed these patents for what... (more) |
|
|
The God Wave (2016) |
|
| Patrick Hemstreet |
|
A neuroscientist and mathematician team up to boost the intellectual power of some experimental subjects by altering their brain waves in this techno-thriller. Math is frequently mentioned throughout... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Gold Dust and Star Dust (1929) |
|
| Cyrill Wates |
|
Gold disappears overnight! From a locked warehouse! Obviously, our detective, Mr. Corwin, immediately figures out that the stuff has fallen through a crack in the fourth dimension. It has not been stolen,... (more) |
|
|
Gomez (1954) |
|
| Cyril M. Kornbluth |
|
this story is about a physics prodigy, but a mathematical equation
appears in it -- the first time I read story the equation didn't make any
sense to me, but eventually I realized that it was a... (more) |
|
|
The Gostak and the Doshes (1930) |
|
| Miles J. Breuer (M.D.) |
|
In this classic science fiction story, a mathematical physicist convinces his friend to try to travel into another dimension by merely altering the way he thinks about things. The friend finds himself... (more) |
|
|
The Grand Wheel (1977) |
|
| Barrington J. Bayley |
|
This is primarily space opera, but with a mathematical element in
the fictional discovery of randomatics: a science which shows that
the Gambler's Fallacy is true under certain conditions, enabling
random... (more) |
|
|
The Grass and Tree (2003) |
|
| Eliot Fintushel |
|
The Banach-Tarski paradox is invoked repeatedly as the underlying
explanation for shapeshifting. And higher-dimensional generalizations
prove crucial to the plot. The author goes so far as to cite... (more) |
|
|
Ground Zero Man (The Peace Machine) (1971) |
|
| Bob Shaw |
|
A self-described `unimportant mathematician' who works on guidance systems for a British weapons manufacturer discovers, just by playing around with the formulas, a way to cause the explosion of every... (more) |
|
|
Gödel geht [Gödel's Exit] (1991) |
|
| Andreas Findig |
|
Kurt Gödel's reflection steps out of the mirror and joins him at his table in a cafe. (That may seem weird, but the author assures us that such fantastical things are always happening in Vienna.) Since... (more) |
|
|
Gödel Incomplete (2013) |
|
| Martha Goddard (Writer and Director) |
|
A 21st century physicist repeatedly travels back in time for short visits to the 20th century as a result of her experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. For completely unexplained reasons, she always... (more) |
|
|
Gödel Numbers (1969) |
|
| J.W. Swanson |
|
The story revolves around an ancient stone artifact found near Cairo which has engraved markings of slanted lines. In an incredible non-sequitor, one of the characters in the story guesses that the numbers... (more) |
|
|
Gödel's Sunflowers (1992) |
|
| Stephen Baxter |
|
Far in the future, a human explores a giant fractal construction which is a
physical realization of the total knowledge of the creatures which created
it long ago. In the process he learns about (more) |
|
|
Habitus (1998) |
|
| James Flint |
|
There is no doubt that this novel is a work of mathematical fiction, but I'm not sure how to describe it. I think the best word for it may be "uneven". It does some great things, both presenting some... (more) |
|
|
Hamisch in Avalon (1995) |
|
| Eliot Fintushel |
|
This story marks the return of the Yiddishe mystic Izzy and his daughter
in-law (now a math professor) Hamisch previously encountered in Izzy at the Lucky Three. There isn't as much math in
this story,... (more) |
|
|
The Heart on the Other Side (1962) |
|
| George Gamow |
|
A math professor and his beloved girlfriend try to imagine how they could win the approval of her father for their marriage. She laments that he could only do so by being helpful in her father's profession,... (more) |
|
|
Heavy Weather (1994) |
|
| Bruce Sterling |
|
Tornado weather in Texas gets worse over the coming decades, and a team
headed by a supergenius mathematician confronts the ultimate tornado.
Includes explicit summaries of his mathematical prowess (surprisingly,
not chaos theory) and of his complete social incompetence (not a surprise,
I suppose).
(more) |
|
|
Herbrand's Conjecture and the White Sox Scandal (1993) |
|
| Eliot Fintushel |
|
Hi, I'm Eliot Fintushel, the author of HERBRAND'S CONJECTURE AND THE WHITE
SOX SCANDAL. The idea is that the mathematical logician Jacques Herbrand
who actually did die in a mountaineering accident... (more) |
|
|
The Hidden Girl (2017) |
|
| Ken Liu |
|
The daughter of a general during the Tang Dynasty is kidnapped by an assassin who can travel into higher dimensions. She is trained to also be an assassin, but cleverly plans her own escape.
Among... (more) |
|
|
Hidden in Glass (1931) |
|
| Paul Ernst |
|
A murder mystery involving a mathematical physicist. One Professor Brainard, who is claimed to have mastered "the secret of the fourth dimension" (haven't they all in the pulps?), has a serious professional... (more) |
|
|
The Higher Mathematics (1954) |
|
| Martin C. Wodehouse |
|
This short story is written as a total spoof which reminded me of Martin Gardner’s “The No-Sided professor”, with a certain amount of snarky humor woven in.
A professor of physics conducts an... (more) |
|
|
Hilbert's Hotel (1999) |
|
| Ian Stewart |
|
Another take on the idea (attributed to lectures by David Hilbert) that the bizarre properties of the countably infinite can best be presented through the analogy of a hotel. Here, Mr. and Mrs. Smith... (more) |
|
|
His Master's Voice (1968) |
|
| Stanislaw Lem |
|
In this book, we follow the investigations of a team of scientists and mathematicians trying to figure out the meaning of an apparent "message" being sent through space. The novel is written with "tongue... (more) |
|
|
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) |
|
| Douglas Adams |
|
Everyone ought to read this trilogy of four (or is it five now?) books that brilliantly combine science fiction with the drollest of British humor. Despite my high regard for it, I've not added it to... (more) |
|
|
The Hollow Man (1993) |
|
| Dan Simmons |
|
A psychic mathematician is driven to the edge of insanity as his life partner approaches death. The mathematician's research is described explicitly -- as are some of the horrific events that befall... (more) |
|
|
The Holmes-Ginsbook Device (1969) |
|
| Isaac Asimov |
|
A scientist recounts how, stung by his former professor
hogging all the credit for figuring out a way to safely
light cigarettes and girlwatch at the same time, he and
... (more) |
|
|
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010) |
|
| Charles Yu |
|
Fans of mathematical fiction are likely to love the self-referential nature of this novel about a time-machine repairman whose future self travels back in time to give him a novel about a time-machine... (more) |
|
|
The Humans: A Novel (2013) |
|
| Matt Haig |
|
After Cambridge mathematician Andrew Martin proves the Riemann Hypothesis, he is replaced by an alien whose job it is to prevent news of the discovery from spreading as it is their belief that humans are... (more) |
|
|
The Hyland Resolution (2020) |
|
| Justin Tarquin |
|
Charles Hyland is the sort of math professor who can be totally distracted by a mathematical question while he and several academic colleagues are under attack by an enemy army on the moon. (Specifically,... (more) |
|
|
The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin (1927) |
|
| Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi |
|
Written by a distant relative of the more famous author Count Tolstoy,
by one of the first Russian science fiction writers, this tells the
story of a mad scientist who tries to take over the world,... (more) |
|
|
i (2005) |
|
| Paul Evanby |
|
A computer programmer meets a composer who is trying to incorporate complex numbers into musical theory:
I nodded slowly, and pointed at the other screen. “What about that?”
He pursed his lips.... (more) |
|
|
I Sin Every Number (2007) |
|
| Jason Earls |
|
This is another work of experimental fiction from Jason Earls that combines some real computational number theory, some mathematical terminology used within nonsense for poetic effect, and a science fiction... (more) |
|
|
The Ifth of Oofth (1957) |
|
| Walter Trevis |
|
[This] is a short, zany, tall-tale reminiscent of Heinlein's "And He Built A Crooked House". Someone ends up making a 3-dimensional, unfolded projection of a 5-dimensional hypercube, a Penteract. The... (more) |
|
|
The Image in the Mirror (1933) |
|
| Dorothy Leigh Sayers |
|
Lord Peter Wimsey, while staying at an inn, finds a stranger is
completely rapt in reading and rereading from a book of Wimsey's.
It turns out to be H G Wells' story of a man inverted via the
fourth... (more) |
|
|
The Imaginary (1942) |
|
| Isaac Asimov |
|
As Asimov notes in his afterword to it (in THE EARLY ASIMOV), it is mostly about the idea of applying mathematical formulae to psychology, which he later did with his psychohistory in the "Foundation"... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Immune Dreams (1978) |
|
| Ian Watson |
|
A creepy but interesting story that combines the genetics of cancer, the neurology of dreaming, immunology, and the mathematics of catastrophe theory (a precursor of what we now call "chaos theory"). ... (more) |
|
|
Improbable (2005) |
|
| Adam Fawer |
|
A probability expert suffering from epilepsy (with hints of schizophrenia) is in over his head with gambling debts to the Russian mob and a beautiful, renegade CIA agent before discovering that he has the ability to predict the future. A running subplot is the mathematical aspects of determinism (i.e. (more) |
|
|
In Alien Flesh (1978) |
|
| Gregory Benford |
|
A human scientist discovers that the Drongheda, a whale-like alien species, do sophisticated mathematics that he can access by climbing inside an orifice and implanting electrodes inside their bodies.... (more) |
|
|
In Fading Suns and Dying Moons (2003) |
|
| John Varley |
|
There is an explicit reference not only to mathematics, but to mathematical fiction in this scary short story. When strange creatures with an unusual interest in butterflies begin appearing on the Earth, it takes a mathematician and familiarity with Abbott's Flatland to understanding what is going on. (more) |
|
|
In The Country of the Blind (1990) |
|
| Michael Flynn |
|
Sarah Beaumont escaped from the modern American ghetto to become a successful journalist, programmer and real estate investor. However, while investigating an idea for developing her latest real estate... (more) |
|
|
In the Courts of the Sun (2009) |
|
| Brian D'Amato |
|
A modern descendant of the Mayans and his former mentor (a game theorist) realize that the famous Mayan prediction that the world will end in the year 2012 is based on some seemingly reasonable math, and... (more) |
|
|
In the River (2006) |
|
| Justin Stanchfield |
|
A female mathematics professor undergoes a surgical procedure to enable her to live and communicate with aquatic aliens. Her goal is to learn to understand their mathematics well enough to reproduce their... (more) |
|
|
Incandescence (2008) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
This "hard SF" novel focuses on the scientific progress of aliens living on a planet near the galactic center. Presumably because the curvature of space was obvious to them from the start (while it took... (more) |
|
|
Incident on Simpac III: A Scientific Novel (2018) |
|
| Doug Brugge |
|
In this science fiction novel, human colonization of extra-solar planets is guided by "synthesis", mathematical algorithms that make determinations about the best course of action in the future based on... (more) |
|
|
The Indefatigable Frog (1953) |
|
| Philip K. Dick |
|
A parody of science utilizing the old "Zeno's Paradox". Originally appeared in Fantastic Story Magazine (July 1953) and republished
recently in The Ascent of Wonder.
A funny story where annoyingly... (more) |
|
|
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) |
|
| James Mangold / Jez Butterworth/John-Henry Butterworth/David Koepp |
|
I finally saw this final installment of the Indiana Jones movies and was surprised that there was a mathematical aspect to it. In hindsight, I realize that the reason I did not hear about it is that it... (more) |
|
|
The Infinite Assassin (1991) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
Originally published in `Interzone #48', June 1991.
There are multiple realities. As the narrator puts it, `the number of
parallel worlds is uncountably infinite - infinite like the real numbers,
not... (more) |
|
|
The Infinite Plane (1981) |
|
| Paul J. Nahin |
|
As a student, Richard Mackley discussed some philosophical aspects of the
mathematical abstraction of an infinite plane with his math
professor. For instance, they noted that the plane would look the... (more) |
|
|
The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells (Episode: The Truth about Pyecraft) (2001) |
|
| Chris Harrald (Script) / Clive Exton (Script) / Herbert George Wells (story) |
|
Please correct me if I'm mistaken here, but it seems that the 2001 TV miniseries The Infinite Worlds of H.G. Wells took the story ``The Truth about Pyecraft'', which has no math in it, and made the main... (more) |
|
|
Infinities (2002) |
|
| John Barrow |
|
This play, written by Cambridge cosmologist John Barrow, has been produced and performed in Italy (Milan and Valencia). It is made up of five separate vignettes several of which touch on the deep mathematics... (more) |
|
|
The Infinitive of Go (1980) |
|
| John Brunner |
|
John Brunner's novel, "The Infinitive of Go" is a story about teleporting devices based on a "posting" principle affecting living objects in the process of "posting" - the author describes it in terms... (more) |
|
|
Inflexible Logic (1940) |
|
| Russell Maloney |
|
There is a famous example of probability which (in one of its many
forms) states that six chimpanzees randomly typing at six typewriters
would eventually reproduce all of the books in the British museum.... (more) |
|
|
Inherit the Stars (1977) |
|
| James P. Hogan |
|
50,000 old human remains are found on the moon, along with lots of
documentation. The entry point to deciphering the totally unknown
language is mathematical tables and formulae."
(more) |
|
|
Inside Out (1987) |
|
| Rudy Rucker |
|
The story itself is quite disturbing IMO but has the usual zaniness of his other writings. Features quarks as "hypertoroidal vortex rings/loops of superstring", a "cumberquark", "hypertorii with fuzzy... (more) |
|
|
Instantiation (2019) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
In this sequel to 3-adica, the conscious video game characters plan an escape that feels like a cross between Mission Impossible and Inception, but with the addition of famous mathematicians sitting around... (more) |
|
|
Into Darkness (1992) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
Creepy story about a man who volunteers to rescue people from a
worm-hole that randomly appears in cities, killing anyone who is not
able to make it to the center of the spacetime-distortion before it
disappears.... (more) |
|
|
Into the Comet (1960) |
|
| Arthur C. Clarke |
|
When a computer malfunction prevents the crew of a spaceship from being able to determine a trajectory back to Earth, they are forced to resort to using an abacus to aid in the computation. [Note that... (more) |
|
|
Into the Fourth (1925) |
|
| Adam Hull Shirk |
|
Here's another one of those flimsy "Fourth Dimension" dimension stories; standard fare: a mathematician breathlessly invokes the higher spatial dimension to conjure up a window into hyperspace. This... (more) |
|
|
The Inverted World (1974) |
|
| Christopher Priest |
|
About a mobile city that must tap its
power from a mysterious `optimum point', which is less effective for
their engines as it gets more distant. Weird distortion of the
surrounding world is based... (more) |
|
|
The Investigation (1959) |
|
| Stanislaw Lem |
|
In investigating a bizarre case of missing -- and apparently resurrected bodies -- an investigator at Scotland Yard consults mystics, philosophers, and (most significantly to the book as well as to this... (more) |
|
|
The Island of Five Colors (1952) |
|
| Martin Gardner |
|
In this sequel to The No-sided Professor, our
heroes tackle the Four Color Theorem, which was
unproved at the time. (See here for a brief summary of a recent proof.) Included are some historically... (more) |
|
|
It was the Monster from the Fourth Dimension (1951) |
|
| Al Feldstein |
|
I found a story from a Weird Science issue of 1951 (i believe it's # 7) titled It Was the Monster From the Fourth Dimension. It's written and drawn by Al Feldstein.
It is about a farmer whose farm... (more) |
|
|
Izzy at the Lucky Three (1996) |
|
| Eliot Fintushel |
|
There are two kinds of weird: good weird and bad weird. This story
is the third kind. I mean, what can you say about a story in which the
Yiddishe mystic Izzy encounters
the demon spirit who created... (more) |
|
|
I’ll Follow The Sun (2014) |
|
| Paul Di Filippo |
|
An American math student in Canada in 1964 obtains help from his math professor, Chan Davis, to avoid being drafted into the military during the Vietnam War, which had already killed his uncle. The math... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Jack of Eagles (1952) |
|
| James Blish |
|
Blish bases this novel on a quasi-mathematical explanation of ESP and psycho-kinesis which was really not necessary and doesn't hold together at all (“the activity of the psi mechanism as a whole... (more) |
|
|
The Janus Equation (1980) |
|
| Steven G. Spruill |
|
In an alternate reality where John Kennedy survived the assassination attempt and replaced all national governments with five all-powerful corporations, an award-winning mathematician tries to invent a... (more) |
|
|
John Jones's Dollar (1915) |
|
| Harry Stephen Keeler |
|
The main mathematical content of this science fiction story is an illustration of the potential of exponential growth in the form of considering how a single dollar invested in a bank would grow in value... (more) |
|
|
Jurassic Park (1990) |
|
| Michael Crichton |
|
Although there is really not much mathematics in this SF thriller at all, the
mathematician (played in the
film by
Jeff Goldbloom) has an important role as the only
person smart enough to recognize... (more) |
|
|
Ker-Plop (1979) |
|
| Ted Reynolds |
|
Two branches of humanity meet after 300,000 years without
contact. At one point, comparison is made between their
different modes of existence via explicit... (more) |
|
|
Killing Time (2000) |
|
| Frank Tallis |
|
In this noir thriller, a British math grad student discovers antique lab equipment which allows him to see into the past and winds up murdering his girlfriend. Sex (explicitly described) and interpersonal... (more) |
|
|
The Kingdom of Ohio (2009) |
|
| Matthew Flaming |
|
Cheri-Anne Toledo, the daughter of the King of Ohio, uses her mathematical skills (and the assistance of Nikola Tesla) to build a device that is supposed to be able transport people instantaneously from... (more) |
|
|
The Kissing Number (1992) |
|
| Ian Stewart |
|
Published as part of his "Mathematical Recreations" column in Scientific
American (February 1992), this story concerns human colonists on Mars
who are trying to figure out how many non-overlapping "circular"... (more) |
|
|
The Labyrinth Key (2004) |
|
| Howard V. Hendrix |
|
In the near future, the US and China engage in a race involving
the ultimate quantum computer and quantum cryptography. Along
the way, numerous mathematical concepts are cited and sometimes
discussed,... (more) |
|
|
The Land of No Shadow (1931) |
|
| Carl H Claudy |
|
Claudy's regular characters, the brilliant Alan Kane and the brawny Ted Dolliver, journey into the fourth dimension in this pulpy SciFi story. The tennis balls that journey into this trans-dimensional... (more) |
|
|
The Last Answer (1980) |
|
| Isaac Asimov |
|
Physicist Murray Templeton dies and is then surprised to find that he somehow still exists. Murray engages in a conversation with his Creator (who is bemused at being called `God'),... (more) |
|
|
The Last Magician (1952) |
|
| Bruce Elliott |
|
Science-fiction story about a magician performing for aliens using a Klein bottle as a prop. (more) |
|
|
The Last Starship from Earth (1968) |
|
| John Boyd |
|
A mathematician named Haldane IV and a poet named Helix fall in love and try to learn the truth about the famous 19th century mathematician Fairweather I. Unfortunately, both of these things are against... (more) |
|
|
The Last Theorem (2008) |
|
| Arthur C. Clarke / Frederik Pohl |
|
Ranjit Subramanian, the protagonist in this science fiction novel, is a young Sri Lankan man who (re)discovers a short and elementary proof of Fermat's Last Theorem while enduring torture during an unjust... (more) |
|
|
The Law (1947) |
|
| Robert M. Coates |
|
In this story, the "law of averages" ceases to apply (so that, for instance, everyone in Manhattan decides to drive across the Triborough Bridge on the same evening). As a result, it is necessary for... (more) |
|
|
Left or Right (1951) |
|
| Martin Gardner |
|
Originally published in Esquire magazine in 1951, this story
about a space ship "flipping" through the fourth dimension has rarely
been seen because Gardner later worried that it was physically inaccurate.... (more) |
|
|
The Library of Babel (1941) |
|
| Jorge Luis Borges |
|
Years ago, I read The Library of Babel in a volume of collected short
stories by [Argentinian] Jorge Luis Borges, published under the title,
Labyrinths and translated from the [Spanish]. Like many... (more) |
|
|
life.exe (2006) |
|
| Jason Rogers |
|
This work of fiction is not strictly narrative. It is hard to say what is happening since the characters live in the world of "the matrix". Not like the Wachowski Bros.'s epic trilogy of films (though... (more) |
|
|
Lift: The Rise of Mathe-Lingua-Musica (2024) |
|
| Ray Anderson |
|
In this science fiction novel, the World Mathematical Council has determined that humanity will soon be driven to extinction by our violent tendencies. To stop this from happening, they use their time-machine... (more) |
|
|
Light (2002) |
|
| M. John Harrison |
|
This dark and violent space opera features many references to fractals and spaceships "which were made of nothing much more than mathematics, magnetic fields, and some kind of smart carbon".
Here is an... (more) |
|
|
The Light of Other Days (2000) |
|
| Arthur C. Clarke / Stephen Baxter |
|
Using the WormCam (a camera sent through a wormhole in space-time), it is
possible to witness any event that is taking or has taken place in the
universe. This makes privacy essentially an obsolete... (more) |
|
|
Limited Wish (2019) |
|
| Mark Lawrence |
|
In this sequel to One Word Kill, math prodigy Nick Hayes develops the theory of time travel that his future self used to go back in time to meet himself in the first book. The idea, which sounds neat... (more) |
|
|
Lines of Longitude (1997) |
|
| Stephen Baxter |
|
The story tries to delve into Hawking's idea of imaginary time - how it may occur that at the beginning of the universe, time and space were ambiguously defined, smeared out into each other as a flattened... (more) |
|
|
The Living Equation (1934) |
|
| Nathan Schachner |
|
A mathematician invents a machine that provides abstract mathematical objects ("vectors" and "tensors") a certain reality. His goal is to allow them not to solve equations but to create new ones. However,... (more) |
|
|
Location, velocity, end point (2022) |
|
| Matt Tighe |
|
A time-traveler tries to reach the right point in spacetime to save his young son from a horrible disease. However, the computations he needs to achieve this goal are frustrated by some analogue of Heisenberg's... (more) |
|
|
Locker 49, or the Volunteers (2021) |
|
| David Rogers |
|
This short story is a tale of mysterious synchronicity revolving around: the Fibonacci sequence, spirals, horrific deaths and disappearances of school children, spacetime anomalies, and an empty school... (more) |
|
|
The Logic Pool (1997) |
|
| Stephen Baxter |
|
The Logic Pool deals with an intelligence that is similar
to the meme-minds in Gregory Benford's Foundations Fear.
Meme-mind -- I think this means some sort of intelligence whose
existence arises... (more) |
|
|
The Long Slow Orbits (1967) |
|
| H.H. Hollis |
|
Tagline: Nice prison! It was a Klein bottle in orbit - easy to escape from, if you didn't mind turning inside out!
A sensitively written, poignant vignette of mankind and society spread out... (more) |
|
|
The Loom of God: Mathematical Tapestries at the Edge of Time (1997) |
|
| Clifford Pickover |
|
A group of time travelers journey back to the time of Pythagoras in an effort to see the origins of mystical mathematics. The journey continues as they explore numerous links between mathematics, nature and mysticism. Concepts featured: pentagonal numbers, perfect numbers, oblong numbers, the golden ratio, and fractals. Religious implications are also discussed.
(more) |
|
|
Love and a Triangle (1899) |
|
| Stanley Waterloo |
|
Julius Corbett, a man of fortune, is in love with an extraordinary woman, Nell Morrison, who is an astronomer. She has a particular penchant for Mars, an in particular, is trying to solve the problem... (more) |
|
|
Luck be a Lady (2009) |
|
| Dean Wesley Smith |
|
A seriously bizarre story about how
Laverne, the Goddess of Luck, has gone missing, and superheroes Poker
Boy, Front Desk Lady, and Screamer go looking for her, only to discover
that the Bookkeeper... (more) |
|
|
Luminous (1995) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
A truly wonderful story in which two math grad students discover that the things we consider to be "truths" in number theory are actually part of a dynamical system, subject to change over time and in... (more) |
|
|
The Lure (2007) |
|
| Bill Napier |
|
Irish mathematician Tom Petrie is called in as an expert to analyze a mysterious stream of particles that appears to be a message from aliens. The math never gets very deep. Petrie is supposed to be... (more) |
|
|
Machines Like Me (2019) |
|
| Ian McEwan |
|
There are many ways to describe this book without mentioning mathematics: It is a romance between Charlie (a slacker who dabbles in day-trading) and Miranda (the law student who lives in the apartment... (more) |
|
|
Macroscope (1969) |
|
| Piers Anthony |
|
A "hard SF" novel by Piers Anthony, who usually writes fantasy, in which mathematics forms a basis of communication between humans and intelligent aliens. In addition, the topological game "sprouts" is... (more) |
|
|
Mad Destroyer (1930) |
|
| Fletcher Pratt |
|
The story is about a mathematician/astronomer who has discovered an exact solution to the multi-body problem in gravitation i.e. a formula which can easily calculate the positions and velocities of N... (more) |
|
|
The Magic Staircase (1946) |
|
| Nelson Slade Bond |
|
A Mathematics professor develops a theory of "intra-dimensional" spaces, hypothesizing that the vast, empty spaces in atoms form a parallel dimension in which alternative histories of "what might have... (more) |
|
|
The Man Who Walked Through Mirrors (1939) |
|
| Robert Bloch |
|
A tongue-in-cheek story making repeated fun of the common, misleading tagline which appeared in many sci fi magazines of the day, “Every Story Scientifically Accurate”.
Volmar Clark was a crackpot... (more) |
|
|
The Mandelbrot Bet (2016) |
|
| Dirk Strasser |
|
The byline of the story is: "Does mathematics truly describe the physical universe, or is the world of mathematics actually the universe itself? And what do these concepts have to do with the hopes and... (more) |
|
|
Manifold Thoughts (2024) |
|
| Patrick Freivald |
|
A talented female mathematics grad student (who is a postdoc by the end of the story) helps her thesis advisor model the dynamics of Calabi-Yau manifolds, discovering that they are both sentient and deadly.
The... (more) |
|
|
Manifold: Time (2000) |
|
| Stephen Baxter |
|
After hearing a (rather bogus sounding) mathematical proof that
civilization is headed for disaster, mathematician Cornelius Taine
"sets in motion" this unusual science fiction novel that takes us
through... (more) |
|
|
The Map of Tiny Perfect Things (2021) |
|
| Lev Grossman |
|
This short film is based on a short story by Lev Grossman is a repeat-the-same-day romcom that uses 2D projections of a tesseract as a plot point! I liked it even if it’s a little handwavy, and math... (more) |
|
|
The Martian (2014) |
|
| Andy Weir |
|
An astronaut is stranded alone on Mars and must figure out how to survive until he can be rescued.
My wife and I both loved this "hard SF" novel (soon to be a movie). But, we disagreed about whether... (more) |
|
|
The Masters (1963) |
|
| Ursula K. Le Guin |
|
This short story, which takes place in a world where society is medieval and the sun is seen less than once per year, focuses on the mathematical advances brought about by the primary protagonist, Ganil.... (more) |
|
|
Mathematica (1936) |
|
| John Russell Fearn |
|
Using a strange metal which gives them the power to change reality with their thoughts, two humans either summon or create an alien who explains to them that reality is mathematics. Together, they seek... (more) |
|
|
Mathematica Plus (1936) |
|
| John Russell Fearn |
|
In this sequel to Mathematica, the humans, now knowing that everything is mathematics and having been made immortal by the ultimate mathematician, encounter a race of beings somewhere between material... (more) |
|
|
The Mathematical Kid (1940) |
|
| Ross Rocklynne |
|
Ross Rocklynne had a specific style in many of his stories. Set up a very non-standard astrophysical situation, and then solve it unconventionally. In “The Mathematical Kid”, he describes a young... (more) |
|
|
Mathematical Revelations (2021) |
|
| Helen De Cruz |
|
Like others in her culture, Priestess Kayla works on mathematical proofs and hopes to receive a message from her creator, the Supreme Mathematician :
I have never had a Mathematical Revelation in my... (more) |
|
|
A Mathematician's Galatea (2010) |
|
| Andrew Magrath |
|
As the author describes this story on his blog:
["Inhuman: Absolute XPress Flash Fiction Challenge #4" is] an anthology of stories all written from the perspective of a non-human character. I liked... (more) |
|
|
The Mathematicians (1953) |
|
| Arthur Feldman |
|
A father tells his daughter of an invasion of the Earth by aliens who were "the greatest mathematicians in the galaxy":
"Go on, papa. These beings over-ran all Earth. Go on from there."
"You must... (more) |
|
|
Mathematicians in Love (2006) |
|
| Rudy Rucker |
|
Together, two math grad students who are both in love with the same girl prove a theorem which characterizes all dynamical systems (from the stock market to the motion of particles) in terms of objects... (more) |
|
|
Mathematician’s Heaven (1912) |
|
| Hunter Frances |
|
An utterly trite, juvenile story which one wants to rescue only because of its long age and the fact that it was published in something as cutely named as “Tipyn O’bob” (a magazine run by students... (more) |
|
|
The Mathematics of Magic (1940) |
|
| L. Sprague de Camp / Fletcher Pratt |
|
The "Enchanter Stories" by de Camp and Pratt are a very popular series of SF/fantasy stories whose protagonist, Harold Shea, is able to travel to other universes using symbolic logic. "The Mathematics... (more) |
|
|
The Mathenauts (1964) |
|
| Norman Kagan |
|
A hilarious story that plays with the mind-blowing idea that it may not be that mathematics describes reality, but instead that reality is mathematics.
In the future presented by this story, only those... (more) |
|
|
Mathenauts: Tales of Mathematical Wonder (1987) |
|
| Rudy Rucker (editor) |
|
This collection contains a wonderful assortment of
mathematically oriented SF written between 1962 (when Mathematical
Magpie appeared) and 1987 when this volume was published. Editor Rudy Rucker is... (more) |
|
|
A Matter of Mathematics (1999) |
|
| Brian Wilson Aldiss |
|
A space/time shortcut is found connecting the earth to the moon. Its use
provokes an alien response, consisting of a device encoding within it some
very strange mathematics.
(For those interested, the title story of the Aldiss collection was the
original inspiration for Kubrick/Spielberg's AI.)
Also published as "The Apollo Asteroid". In Crowther and Greenberg (eds)
"Moon Shots". (more) |
|
|
A Matter of Mathematics (2005) |
|
| Tony Ballantyne |
|
A story about the attempt by the British to change the tilt of Earth's axis to create a more suitable environment for themselves and how the Americans foil it. The British have been launching incessant... (more) |
|
|
The Maxwell Equations (1969) |
|
| Anatoly Dnieprov |
|
The math in this story seems very real, though the specifics of it are
inconsequential to the plot. A mathematical physicist in an isolated
city needs help finding a solution to a linearized version... (more) |
|
|
The Memory of Whiteness (1985) |
|
| Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
Far in the future of the human race, the brilliant mathematician Holywelkin discovers a new physical theory that allows us to understand particle physics and build the amazing "whitsuns" which in turn... (more) |
|
|
Merlin Planet (1968) |
|
| E.G. Von Wald |
|
A lovely tale which merges mathematics / logic systems and magic to a satisfying conclusion. And what a great hook of a tagline in the story! “On Arrey, you could survive - as a frog. Unless you could... (more) |
|
|
Mersenne's Mistake (2008) |
|
| Jason Earls |
|
This is a nice piece of mathematical fiction in which the mathematician/monk Marin Mersenne encounters a demon with amazing mathematical skills. Like the other stories by Earls, this seems to be designed to showcase the interesting numbers which he has found using computer algebra tools.
(more) |
|
|
Message Found in a Copy of Flatland (1983) |
|
| Rudy Rucker |
|
This is the story that answers the age old question: "What if Flatland was in the basement of a Pakistani restaurant in London?".
The answer is scarier than you might think, especially when you
realize... (more) |
|
|
Methuselah's Children (1958) |
|
| Robert A. Heinlein |
|
The supporting character of "Slipstick" Libby in this classic science fiction novel is a mathematician, or at least mathematically inclined. This has little to do with the novel's main plot, which concerns... (more) |
|
|
Micromegas (1752) |
|
| François Marie Arouet de Voltaire |
|
"Micromegas" is a Voltaire short story, obviously inspired by Swift's
Gulliver's Travels. The title character comes from a planet
orbiting Sirius, and stands 120,000 feet tall. Before spelling out
Micromegas'... (more) |
|
|
The Midnighters (Series) (2004) |
|
| Scott Westerfield |
|
Teenagers discover an extra hour to the day during which they can do things while everyone else is frozen. Unfortunately, they also have to worry about the Darklings!
One of the teens, Dess, is interested... (more) |
|
|
Milo and Sylvie (2000) |
|
| Eliot Fintushel |
|
"Shapeshifting is treated as a form of Banach-Tarski
equidecomposition. And part of a Zorn's Lemma proof
is given explicitly."
This story appeared in the March 2000... (more) |
|
|
Mimsy Were the Borogoves (1943) |
|
| Lewis Padgett (aka Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore) |
|
Far in the future, humans have not only improved their digestive tracts
(eliminating the appendix and shortening their large intestine) and invented a time machine, but they have also invented educational
toys... (more) |
|
|
Mine the Primes (2005) |
|
| Julian Todd |
|
In this SF short story, mathematicians work to discover new prime numbers which are used to power space ships. The concept of "mining" numbers probably seemed very "science fictiony" and perhaps even... (more) |
|
|
Mirror Image (1972) |
|
| Isaac Asimov |
|
A robot volunteers the aid of his human, Earthling friend to settle a
dispute between a pair of feuding "spacer" mathematicians. It seems that an
old mathematician (over 270 years old in fact) and a... (more) |
|
|
Misfit (1939) |
|
| Robert A. Heinlein |
|
A crew of misfits ships out to the asteroid belt. One member turns
out to be a misfit among the misfits: he's a mathematical prodigy.
His skills prove to be very valuable.
reprinted in THE PAST... (more) |
|
|
The Mobius Trail (1948) |
|
| George Smith |
|
One Mr. Joseph Kingsley, after years of toiling and tooling, creates an electrical gadget which ends up acting very much like an open wormhole with both ends of the wormhole accessible, the kind you... (more) |
|
|
A Modern Comedy of Science (1936) |
|
| Issac Nathanson |
|
Prof. Newell “had a reputation for his profound researches into the realm of theoretical physics; a great mathematician in the thin heights where few could follow him. His lectures on the fourth dimension,... (more) |
|
|
Moebius (1996) |
|
| Gustavo Daniel Mosquera R. |
|
In this Argentinian film, a mathematician discovers a bizarre topological
explanation for the disappearance of a train in the labrynthian Buenos
Aires subway system. Although based on the short story... (more) |
|
|
The Moebius Room (1952) |
|
| Robert Donald Locke |
|
Tagline: “It was more than a vicious circle—it was a vicious square.”
A spy-prisoner with no recollection of most of his identity or history (due to a suppressant chemical) finds himself trapped... (more) |
|
|
Moebius Trip (2006) |
|
| Janny Wurts |
|
Featuring an aging mirror-maker who is asked to create a mirror which acts like a moebius strip and shows a reflection of the past and the future. Frankly, I did not think it was done well at all and... (more) |
|
|
Monday Begins on Saturday (1966) |
|
| Arkady Strugatsky / Boris Strugatsky |
|
In this parody of the activity at Soviet research thinktanks, mathematics underlies the "science" of magic. Math is rarely discussed in depth and a knowledge of Russian fairy tales helps the reader to... (more) |
|
|
The Monopole Affair (2003) |
|
| Ken Wharton |
|
This short story in the May 2003 issue of Analog by physicist
Wharton includes references to the role of higher dimensions in string
theory.
References to string theory, but much more about physics than math (which gets a passing mention).
(more) |
|
|
Monster (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
A story about group theory, plagiarism, the untapped potential of a collaboration between mathematics and marketing, the bleak financial future of academia, and the Monster.
This story talks about... (more) |
|
|
Monster's Proof (2009) |
|
| Richard Lewis |
|
With parents and a younger brother who are all "mathematical geniuses", Livey Ell (who is in danger of getting kicked out of cheerleading unless she improves her algebra grades) is a bit too normal. Things... (more) |
|
|
Moriarty by Modem (1995) |
|
| Jack Nimersheim |
|
A cyberversion of Sherlock Holmes is created to track down an accidently
released cyberversion of Moriarty. The big clue involves both the binomial
theorem and binomial variables.
Published in... (more) |
|
|
Mother's Milk (2005) |
|
| Andrew Thomas Breslin |
|
Lawyer Cindy Kichlklug takes on the dairy industry (with the aid of a quirky mathematician) in this witty SF satire.
The "conspiracy theory" in the book is well put together. It tightly combines so... (more) |
|
|
Mozart on Morphine (1989) |
|
| Gregory Benford |
|
A mathematician nearly loses his life to appendicitis. While
sedated in the hospital, he describes the loony stuff that flits through his
head, and how it relates to the subjective and personal processes... (more) |
|
|
Ms Fnd in a Lbry (1961) |
|
| Hal Draper |
|
Hal Draper took a break from his life's work of promoting Marxism,
and wrote one science fiction story. The information explosion, and
associated storage and retrieval problems, is humorously examined
in... (more) |
|
|
Music of the Spheres (2011) |
|
| Ken Liu |
|
The short stories in the anthology Mirror Shards all focus on augmented reality (AR), the idea that our perception of the world around us will be fundamentally changed by the use of advanced technology.... (more) |
|
|
My Random Friend (1977) |
|
| Larry Eisenberg |
|
Gene Berry was a statistical anomaly. A foster child who had changed four families, he was “god-damned bright”, “a treasure-trove of disparate facts” and blessed with “extraordinary reasoning... (more) |
|
|
Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley (2016) |
|
| Danyl McLauchlan |
|
A semi-serious Lovecraftian novel set in New Zealand's Te Aro suburb featuring some mystical mathematicians (and questions of Platonism) in a central role.
This sequel to the Danyl McLauchlan's "Unspeakable... (more) |
|
|
N Day (1943) |
|
| Philip Latham |
|
An astronomer's observations of the sun lead him to predict the sun will go nova in just a few days. The formula that he used for his prediction is included explicitly. "Philip Latham" is
the pseudonym of Robert Shirley Richardson.
(more) |
|
|
Nanunculus (1997) |
|
| Ian Watson |
|
A mathematician wishes to commit suicide, but is pestered by an automated visitor from the future programmed to make certain that the mathematician discovers the key to time travel before he does.
Appears in the collection The Great Escape
and first published in Interzone January 1997.
(more) |
|
|
Napier's Bones (2011) |
|
| Derryl Murphy |
|
In the fantasy/SF world of this novel, numerates are special people who are aware of the fact that numbers themselves are alive and can be coaxed or controlled into doing seemingly magical things for them.... (more) |
|
|
Narrow Valley (1966) |
|
| R.A. Lafferty |
|
This is a madcap story about a tract of land which is topologically folded through a shamanic incantation. Contains descriptions of some physical effects but explicitly states that the topological defect... (more) |
|
|
The Nature of Smoke (1996) |
|
| Anne Harris |
|
Science fiction thriller combining genetic engineering and chaos theory.
The math is not presented in a way that conveys any real meaning to the
reader, but perhaps some feeling for the beauty of math... (more) |
|
|
Neverness (1988) |
|
| David Zindell |
|
"[In this book], the Order of Pilots tries to tackle the Continuum Hypothesis.
It's a long, strange, complex story, but it seems pretty certain that the
author
had some mathematical training. He tries... (more) |
|
|
A New Golden Age (1981) |
|
| Rudy Rucker |
|
In this story, and in our world as well, mathematicians lament the
fact that legislators cannot sufficiently appreciate mathematics and
that this adversely affects the funding of their science. To address
this... (more) |
|
|
The New Reality (1950) |
|
| Charles Leonard Harness |
|
The theme of this story concerns the idea that observation
determines reality, and takes it to a more profound level than
is usual in quantum mechanics. Along the way, the history of
π and of... (more) |
|
|
The New Warriors (Issue #4) (1990) |
|
| Fabian Nicieza (writer) / Mark Bagley (artist) |
|
The New Warriors were a team of Marvel superheroes whose enemies included the psychic mathematical genius known as Mathemanic. Mathemanic first appeared in issue #4 (October 1990) but also appeared in... (more) |
|
|
Newton's Gift (1979) |
|
| Paul J. Nahin |
|
Time traveller Wallace John Steinhope believes that he will be able to help
his hero, Isaac Newton, avoid the tedium of computation by bringing him an electronic
calculator that can do simple arithmetic.... (more) |
|
|
The Next Dimension (1947) |
|
| Vladimir Karapetoff |
|
"A Mathematical Play in Five Dialogs". Once again, we are treated to the
Flatland notion of two-dimensional creatures
pondering a "hypothetical" three dimensional existence. Many of the usual
concerns... (more) |
|
|
Nice Girl with Five Husbands (1951) |
|
| Fritz Leiber |
|
A man is unwittingly swept by a time wind 100 years
into the future. He and the people he meets in the
future--including the nice girl of the title--talk
at cross purposes, but no one realizes... (more) |
|
|
The Nine Billion Names of God (1953) |
|
| Arthur C. Clarke |
|
As much about computers as it is about mathematics, we join two
programmers hired by a Buddhist sect seeking to find all true names of
God by exhausting a combinatorial library of possibilities.
Appears... (more) |
|
|
Ninefox Gambit (2016) |
|
| Yoon Ha Lee |
|
In a desperate attempt to retake the Fortress of Needles from the heretics who have taken it over, the mathematically talented Kel captain named Cheris is promoted to the rank of general and mentally... (more) |
|
|
No-Sided Professor (1946) |
|
| Martin Gardner |
|
We all know that among the surprising things you learn when you first
make a Mobius strip is
the fact that out of a two sided piece of paper you can make an object
with only one side. Why should this... (more) |
|
|
Nobody Loves a Moebius Strip (1979) |
|
| Alice Laurance |
|
A very warm and fuzzy 2-page story about a living alien creature shaped in the form of a Mobius Strip. It starts off with:
“You could be interested,, even fascinated by one, you could conceivably... (more) |
|
|
The Non-Statistical Man (1956) |
|
| Raymond F. Jones |
|
In this short story, insurance adjuster Charles Bascomb comes up against his greatest enemy: intuition. The story presents mathematics (especially statistics and logic) as one way man can deal with reality.... (more) |
|
|
Normed Trek (2014) |
|
| Harun Šiljak |
|
This short story is a parody that combines elements of Star Trek with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland using concepts and terminology from mathematics (especially analysis).
Limit, the final frontier.... (more) |
|
|
Not a Chance (2009) |
|
| Peter Haff |
|
A student harangues his physics professor about the possibility that all mathematical proofs are incorrect. His argument is based on the supposed uncertainty about the validity of proofs of the Four Color... (more) |
|
|
Null Set (2019) |
|
| S.L. Huang |
|
Cas Russell, the math-genius mercenary, returns in the sequel to Zero Sum Game. As before, she can perform calculations quickly and accurately enough to determine exactly how she needs to swing, kick,... (more) |
|
|
Null-P (1951) |
|
| William Tenn |
|
The story extrapolates to great lengths (including a complete overthrow of humanity by smartly evolved canines) a simple principle: what might happen if we found a perfectly average man who had quantitative... (more) |
|
|
Nullstellen (1999) |
|
| Dietmar Dath |
|
Two scientists develop a mathematical method of literary analysis based on the use of an "author function". The zeroes of this function (called Nullstellen in German, as in Hilbert's famous (more) |
|
|
The Number of the Beast (1979) |
|
| Robert A. Heinlein |
|
Engineer and physicist Jacob Burroughs invents a time machine which lets
him travel to what we might consider "alternate universes". The underlying
mathematics involves the notion that there are in... (more) |
|
|
Numbercruncher (2013) |
|
| Si Spurrier (writer) / PJ Holden (artist) |
|
A recently deceased mathematician "cracks the recirculation algorithm" and thus is able to control his own reincarnation in the hope of being able to spend more time with the woman he loves. It ends up... (more) |
|
|
Numbers Don't Lie (2005) |
|
| Terry Bisson |
|
This novel is actually just a compilation of three Wilson Wu short stories ("The Hole in the Hole", "The Edge of the Universe" and "Get Me to the Church on Time") which were previously published in Asimov's... (more) |
|
|
Nuremberg Joys (2000) |
|
| Charles Sheffield |
|
A mathematician is on trial for war crimes, regarding
his role in developing an absolutely horrendous killing
weapon based on sophisticated new physics. Guilt or
... (more) |
|
|
Nymphomation (2000) |
|
| Jeff Noon |
|
A math professor's theory of ``nymphomation'' (described in the book as a way for numbers to mate) is used to develop a lottery game called "Domino Bones" that entirely takes over the city of Manchester,... (more) |
|
|
Occam's Razor (1956) |
|
| David Duncan |
|
This story involves the concept of discontinuous time embedded in a sort of “Meta-Time”. Essentially, Duncan proposes the idea that True Reality evolves along Meta-Time which is broken up... (more) |
|
|
Old Faithful (1934) |
|
| Raymond Z. Gallun |
|
An extended discussion of the use of arithmetic in setting up a two-way communication code comprises the mathematical content of this forgotten classic SF short story.
Gallun (rhymes with balloon)... (more) |
|
|
On Another Plane (2020) |
|
| Colin Adams |
|
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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On the Average (1953) |
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| Frank Bryning |
|
Tagline: Critics of Dr. Rhine’s famed ESP experiments have eyed the Law of Averages with skepticism. In space those critics may triumph.
A story which highlights the fact that while statistics have... (more) |
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One (1995) |
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| George Alec Effinger |
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Two interstellar searchers for alien life, after endless failures, must
confront what went wrong in their understanding of Drake's equation, the
famed formula that allegedly estimates the odds of interstellar... (more) |
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One Word Kill (2019) |
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| Mark Lawrence |
|
Nick Hayes, a math prodigy with leukemia in the 1980's, meets his future self in this first book of the "Impossible Times" trilogy from Amazon's publishing arm. The consistent time loop that this creates... (more) |
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Oracle (2000) |
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| Greg Egan |
|
The protagonist, Robert Stoney is a british mathematician who worked on German codes during WW II, was greatly affected by the death of a close friend, and was later persecuted for his homosexuality. ... (more) |
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Ossian's Ride (1959) |
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| Fred Hoyle |
|
In the year 1970 (the future when this science fiction novel was written), the country of Ireland has tremendous financial success and power resulting from a string of amazing technological innovations.... (more) |
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Our Feynman Who Art in Heaven... (2007) |
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| Paul Di Filippo |
|
A religious cult based on the Standard Model (of high energy physics)
has its headquarters in a tesseract.
This story, which is certainly more physical than mathematical, appears in the "Plumage from Pegasus" column in the February 2007 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction and is available for free at their website.
(more) |
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Ouroboros (1997) |
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| Geoffrey A. Landis |
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The question of whether what we call "reality" could be nothing other than a simulation run on a computer gets a mathematically sophisticated treatment in this story. In addition to a vague reference... (more) |
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The Outer Limits (Episode: Behold, Eck!) (1964) |
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| John Mantley (screenplay) / William R. Cox (story) |
|
In this episode of the classic science fiction series Outer Limits, a 2-dimensional being trapped in our world is aided by Dr. Stone, an engineer described as being an expert in "optical geometry" and... (more) |
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The Outside (2019) |
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| Ada Hoffman |
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The way this science fiction novel conflates technology and religion is more interesting than anything it does with mathematics. The "gods" in the book are advanced artificial intelligences and "angels"... (more) |
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The Pacific Mystery (2006) |
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| Stephen Baxter |
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This starts as an alternate history short story, in which Lord Halifax became Prime Minister of England in 1940 and reaches an accommodation with Germany; Germany holds sway over Europe and Russia, Japan... (more) |
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The Pacifist (1966) |
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| Arthur C. Clarke |
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Clarke, one of the all-time biggest names in serious science
fiction, took time to write a series of humorous science
fiction tall tales. The stories are narrated by one Harry
... (more) |
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Paint ‘Em Green (1967) |
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| Burt Filer |
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In some far future, after “the Asians had obliterated themselves with a dazzling atomic mistake”, former allies, Ambrija and Russia, found themselves as cold-war opponents once again, in a race for... (more) |
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Palimpsest (2007) |
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| Howard V. Hendrix |
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A very short story with strong shades of Clarke's "Nine billion Names of God" and "Genesis", coupled with the general idea that our reality is a Turing machine in danger of being subverted by the Great... (more) |
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Panda Ray (1996) |
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| Michael Kandel |
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This science fiction novel is about a dysfunctional family of superbeings (aliens? mutants? humans from the future?) in modern America. It reminds me a bit of the writings of Stanislaw Lem, which is not... (more) |
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Paradox (2000) |
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| John Meaney |
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Young Tom Corcorigan seems to represent the lowest "caste" in the extremely hierarchical human society of the year 3404. However, his mathematical abilities (he is able to figure out a way around Gödel's... (more) |
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Path Correction (2021) |
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| Sylvia Wenmackers |
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This short story, published in the journal Nature, imagines a future in which people can have the Lyapunov exponent of their own lives evaluated for a fee. Theoretically, this would give them an idea... (more) |
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Perelman's Song (2008) |
|
| Tina Chang |
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This story by Tina Chang appears in the February 2008 issue of Math Horizons magazine (see also JSTOR). It uses a conversation between gods manipulating universes in their hands to poetically inform... (more) |
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The Perfect Spiral (2001) |
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| Jason Hornsby |
|
This first novel by controversial young author Jason Hornsby was written when he was 18 years old. It combines elements of genres in an avant garde sort of way, and focuses on the lives of teenagers in... (more) |
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Permafrost (2019) |
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| Alastair Reynolds |
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The daughter of the mathematician whose research led to a practical method for time-travel is sent back in time to save the world in this creative science fiction novella.
Although I describe the work... (more) |
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Perry Rhodan 2638: Zielpunkt Morpheus-System (2012) |
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| Marc A. Herren |
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The long-running German science fiction series Perry Rhodan recently ran a contest whose winner, a certain Martin Felten, was included in issue number 2638 as a space actuary and inventor of a five-dimensional... (more) |
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The Pexagon (2018) |
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| D.J. Rozell |
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A short story about math and physics grad students who, while drinking together at a bar, stumble upon the ability to draw a superposition of different polygons:
Eric looked both scared and excited.... (more) |
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The Phantom of Kansas (1976) |
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| John Varley |
|
A sublunar meteorological artist wakens from her memory
recording to learn that a serial killer has been murdering
her repeatedly, and is presumably still... (more) |
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The Phantom Scientist [Le Chercher Phantôme] (2013) |
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| Robin Cousin |
|
This graphic novel takes place at at "The Institute for the Study of Complex and Dynamic Systems", which facilitates interactions between researchers in different disciplines. Although none of the researchers... (more) |
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Phase IV (1974) |
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| Mayo Simon (writer) / Saul Bass (director) |
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A mathematician who `applied game theory to the language of killer whales' is brought in to help fight an attack by intelligent ants. (more) |
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Pi (1998) |
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| Darren Aronofsky (director) |
|
A mathematician discovers a new relationship between chaos theory and
the number Pi which makes him a target of a dangerous religious sect
and a greedy investor. The references to mathematics and its... (more) |
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Pi in the Sky (1983) |
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| Rudy Rucker |
|
The story is about a family which finds an alien artifact on a beach while on vacation: a smooth cone with patterns of stripes on its surface and which produces sound in the same pattern. It turns out... (more) |
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The Pi Man (1959) |
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| Alfred Bester |
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I found this work in an anthology of Alfred Bester short stories "The Dark Side of the Earth". It is an ironic story of a man that calls himself the Pi Man (irrational) that tries to set a pattern... (more) |
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The Pikestaffe Case (1924) |
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| Algernon Blackwood |
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This quite unsatisfying yarn hangs its hat on the old idea of finding a way into a mirror to discover a new reality. The author waves his hands quite a bit to build an aura of mystery (by appealing... (more) |
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The Planck Dive (1998) |
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| Greg Egan |
|
This short story describes a bizarre experiment in which researchers are cloned (quantum cloning, not the genetic kind; these researchers aren't "fleshers") and sent into a black hole. Their goal is to... (more) |
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Planck Time (2004) |
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| Michael Iwoleit |
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The setting is 2036 to 2038. A 140-km long linear collider ("Super Large Hadron Collider") has been installed at one of the L5 points in earth orbit. Some unknown technology must have been discovered... (more) |
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Planck Zero (1992) |
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| Stephen Baxter |
|
Baxter's hard-SF ideas are often quite stunning in their scope and creativity. "Planck Zero" is no exception to this. An advanced species of aliens - the Ghosts - have started conducting experiments... (more) |
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Plane and Fancy (1944) |
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| P. Schuyler Miller |
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A wonderfully written yarn about a boy who envisions a non-Euclidean geometry, and conjures it up in reality to a very surprising effect... Along the way, there are strong shades of a Ramanujan-Hardy... (more) |
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Plane People (1933) |
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| Wallace West |
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A space-operatic story which implements Edwin Abbott's world of Flatland. A perfectly flat comet strikes earth at a glancing angle and sheers off a very small part, including a few people, who discover... (more) |
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The Plattner Story (1896) |
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| Herbert George Wells |
|
Gottfrieb Plattner disappears after an explosion for nine days.
Upon return, he recounts a strange tale of a parallel world.
More mathematically interesting, he discovers that he is now
left-handed,... (more) |
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Pop Quiz (2005) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
An algebraic geometer is called in when messages from an alien spacecraft appear to be asking questions about projective varieties. Though it may at first appear to be another "mathematics as a common... (more) |
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Post-Bombum [aka Post-Boomboom] (1967) |
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| Alberto Vanasco |
|
Argentinian author and math professor Alberto Vanasco wrote this short story about post-apocalyptic survivors trying to record keys to civilization, and failing miserably. (Thanks to Vijay Fafat for bringing... (more) |
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The Pre-Persons (1974) |
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| Philip K. Dick |
|
His nastiest story, a deeply felt response to Roe vs Wade. Dick imagines a future where Congress has decided that abortion
is legal until the soul enters the body, which is specified as
... (more) |
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A Presence Beyond the Shadows (2024) |
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| David Lee Summers |
|
A math department chair's wife fears their house is haunted. She convinces him to bring home the goggles he invented that allow the wearer to see into the fourth dimension.
Mathematical terminology... (more) |
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PreVision (1936) |
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| John Pierce |
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The story hangs its hat on a clever observation made long ago by many physicists, including Einstein, about the nature of solutions of Maxwell's equations. Since the equations are time-symmetric, they... (more) |
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Primary Inversion (1996) |
|
| Catherine Asaro |
|
In this first book in her "Skolian Saga" series, Asaro explains how faster-than-light speeds are attainable by using imaginary numbers, and hence frequent mentions of "imaginary space" occur throughout... (more) |
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Private i (2022) |
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| S. R. Algernon |
|
This very short story takes the form of a monologue from the operator of a hyper-dimensional private detective service which utilizes complex numbers. The fact that it is delivered "as a one-sided conversation"... (more) |
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Probability Pipeline (1988) |
|
| Rudy Rucker / Marc Laidlaw |
|
A typical Rudy Rucker short story full of techno-jargon and hippie language.
Delbert and Zep are two brothers looking for good surfing opportunities. One day, Delbert hypnotizes Zep and plants an... (more) |
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Problem Child (1964) |
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| Arthur Porges |
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By working ceaselessly on proving a new theorem, a successful math professor tries to avoid thinking about the fact that he has lost his wife who died in childbirth and about Paul, their "vegetable" of... (more) |
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Problem in Geometry (1954) |
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| T.P. Caravan |
|
As the title suggests, this story by Charles Carroll Muñoz (writing under his usual pseudonym) uses a contrived science fiction scenario to set up an interesting problem in differential geometry whose... (more) |
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The Professor's Experiments - The Dimension of Time (1910) |
|
| Paul Bold |
|
There were 6 mad-cap sci-fi stories written by the author about one Prof. Mudgewood in the collection, “The Professor’s Experiments”. The sixth and last one appeared in the Idler Magazine in 1910.... (more) |
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Project Flatty (1956) |
|
| Irving Cox Jr. |
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A very, very nice tale of a double-fake, of phantasmical scenes and nightmares which lead one Rex Bannard to question what is real, what is contrived imagination, and whether we are creatures shackled... (more) |
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Proof by Induction (2021) |
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| José Pablo Iriarte |
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Paul Gifford is a waiting-for-tenure professor of mathematics at a university. His father, a professor-emiritus of mathematics at the same university has just passed away. This death has come at a very... (more) |
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Psychohistorical Crisis (2001) |
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| Donald Kingsbury |
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In the far future, a group of "psychohistorians" controls the fate of humanity using the mathematical theory of "the founder" in this unauthorized "sequel" to Asimov's Foundation series. Kingsbury's lengthy... (more) |
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Pure Math (1992) |
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| John Timson |
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A mildly funny and fairly predictable time travel story involving a stand-alone time loop created by information sent back in time. Jacob Appel is a “Nobel Laureate and the man acknowledged by nearly... (more) |
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|
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The Push of a Finger (1942) |
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| Alfred Bester |
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Story set in 2909. A Prognostication Machine which can look into the future beyond 50 years (but no earlier) predicts the destruction of the entire universe in about 1000 years. Evidently, a new movement... (more) |
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Puzzles from Other Worlds (1984) |
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| Martin Gardner |
|
This is the second collection of science fiction puzzles which Martin Gardner wrote for the Issac Asimov Science Fiction Magazine. The preface describes the book well (as well as the process of mathematical... (more) |
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Pyramids (2001) |
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| Terry Pratchett |
|
Thanks to Aaron Gullison for pointing out that in this Discworld novel, "the camels are all mathematicians, and think in math." For instance,
The greatest mathematician alive on the Disc, and in fact... (more) |
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The Pythagoras Problem (2019) |
|
| Trevor Baxendale |
|
A short story involving the 13th Doctor, a female, and (a drunken) Pythagoras, with his daughter, Myia. The piece deftly uses the idea that certain types of geometric patterns act as magical talismans... (more) |
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Q.E.D. (1984) |
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| Bruce Stanley Burdick |
|
The "Q.E.D." from the title of this short story published in Analog
(volume 104 #12, December 1984, pp. 96-112) is the latin expression "quod
erat demonstratum" that is meant to conclude a proof and... (more) |
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Quanto scommettiamo ("How much do you want to bet?") (1965) |
|
| Italo Calvino |
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The story is about two beings, living since the beginning of the universe (one of them, the protagonist of the book, is "old Qfwfq" - it's not a misprint -, a mysterious being that claims to have witnessed... (more) |
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Quarantine (1977) |
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| Arthur C. Clarke |
|
For safety's sake, all organic life on the planet Earth has been
wiped out by automatic defenses. The investigator looking into
this regrettable turn of affairs in an otherwise promising species
discovers... (more) |
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Quaternia (2015) |
|
| Tom Petsinis |
|
Ivan, the main character in Tom Petsinis' Quaternia, is a fictional teenager who spends a lot of his time and energy on playing video games. Ivan goes beyond merely devoting so much time to this hobby... (more) |
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The Ragged Astronauts (1987) |
|
| Bob Shaw |
|
The novel is set in an alternate universe where two planets orbit each other in close proximity, with a common atmosphere. The civilization on one of the planets is shown to be similar to the western... (more) |
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Rama II (1989) |
|
| Arthur C. Clarke /Gentry Lee |
|
This is the sequel to the novel Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke.
Short Summary:
The huge cylindrical Rama spaceship has returned 70 years after it
arrived near Earth for the first time.... (more) |
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The Rapture of the Nerds (2004) |
|
| Cory Doctorow / Charles Stross |
|
This story is set in Stross's "Accelerando" series,
due for publication in novel form in 2005, offering
a worm's eye view of the "Vinge singularity", the
supposed moment in the coming decades... (more) |
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Ratner's Star (1976) |
|
| Don DeLillo |
|
Billy Terwilliger (aka Twillig) is not your typical 14 year old boy.
True, he is beginning to get interested in sex and thinks that the
word "fart" is entertaining, but he is also a number theorist and... (more) |
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Reading by Numbers (2009) |
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| Aidan Doyle |
|
Elementary number theory and some superstitious numerology underlie this story, which appeared in the November 11, 2009 issue of the online Fantasy Magazine (though I would never describe this story as... (more) |
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Red Zen (2007) |
|
| Jason Earls |
|
A man travels to another planet in an attemp to resolve a bizarre memory problem in this absurdist science fiction novel. As in his other works, Earls includes tidbits of computational number theory.... (more) |
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The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes (1895) |
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| Herbert George Wells |
|
Rather than seeing what is actually around him in England, Davidson sees
events occurring on a rock off of the Antipodes Island. The explanation
offered includes the notion of non-flat geometries for... (more) |
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Report from the Ambassador to Cida-2 (2008) |
|
| Clifton Cunningham |
|
The human selected to communicate with the aquatic aliens of Cida-2 is surprised to learn that their number system differs from our own. In particular, although our communication with the extra-terrestrials... (more) |
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Resistance is Futile (2015) |
|
| Jenny T. Colgan |
|
This novel begins as a familiar farce in which mathematicians are gathered by the government to decipher a message from space. However, in this case, the story soon turns into a romance between a human... (more) |
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Resolution (2006) |
|
| John Meaney |
|
This is the third and apparently final novel in the Nulapeiron sequence. In the first two we see Tom use his skills at fighting and mathematics (called "logosophy" in the book) as well as knowledge gained... (more) |
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Return from the Stars (1961) |
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| Stanislaw Lem |
|
This book contains some of the
most realistic sounding fictional mathematics I have ever read, as
well as some very high praise for mathematics (from a fictional
character). In this book, an astronaut... (more) |
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The Riddle of the Universe & Its Solution (1978) |
|
| Christopher Cherniak |
|
The literature is quite rich in the exploration of harmful memes which can take over the mind through the body’s sensory apparatus, effectively seizing up the brain into a coma or an endless loop.... (more) |
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Riding the Crocodile (2005) |
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| Greg Egan |
|
A couple from the race of “Amalgam” wanted to carry out one project before choosing to die after a life spanning tens of thousands of years: Establishing contact with the elusive race called... (more) |
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Ripples in the Dirac Sea (1988) |
|
| Geoffrey A. Landis |
|
A time machine story based on a combination of Hilbert's Hotel analogy and the "Fermi Sea". We read of the travels of the main character to the ancient past, to the San Francisco earthquake and to the... (more) |
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Risqueman (2009) |
|
| Mike Wood |
|
A brilliant (and beautiful) French mathematician is distressed by governmental misuse of her algorithm which accurately predicts accidents and disasters that previously were only determined probabilistically.... (more) |
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A Rite of Spring (1977) |
|
| Fritz Leiber |
|
Leiber has stretched out a very flimsy story line into a 50-page trivia-fest on the number seven. A genius of a mathematician yearns for his childhood ability to visualize and play with mathematics as... (more) |
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River of Gods (2006) |
|
| Ian McDonald |
|
A science fiction novel about artificial intelligence, politics, cellular automata, climate change and alternate universes that takes place in India of 2047. Math plays only a very small role in this... (more) |
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The Robot's Math Lessons (2019) |
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| Yoon Ha Lee |
|
In this very short story, intentionally incorrect mathematical formulas result in an unusual friendship between a servitor and a human child.
The story was posted as free "flash fiction" on the author's website and was published by Simon and Schuster in 2019 in an anthology of stories that take place in the same universe as Ninefox Gambit.
(more) |
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The Rock (1996) |
|
| Robert Doherty |
|
"Five people--including an Australian Air Force computer operator, a Mexican engineering professor, a New York housewife, a Colombian Special Forces officer, and an English mathematician--are invited to... (more) |
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The Rolling Stones (1952) |
|
| Robert A. Heinlein |
|
The Stone family goes off on a working tour across the solar system.
As a condition for going, the father insists the twins keep up with
their higher mathematics studies, which gets referred to explicitly
several times. The difference between arithmetic and geometric growth
is commented on when their pet "flat cat" reproduces 8 at a time, and
faster than expected.
(more) |
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Round the Moon (1870) |
|
| Jules Verne |
|
This early science fiction novel about space travel (published originally in French, of course) contains two chapters with explicit (and very nice) mathematical content.
In Chapter 4 (A Little Algebra)... (more) |
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Sanatoris Short-Cut (1948) |
|
| Jack Vance |
|
A well-written story about a happy-go-lucky character called “Magnus Ridolph”. Magnus was one of those guys who are meticulous in their analyses in one sphere of life while being surprisingly unplanned... (more) |
|
|
Scandal in the Fourth Dimension (1934) |
|
| Amelia Reynolds Long (as "A.R. Long") |
|
This is yet another pulp "sci-fi" story about a math professor who discovers the fourth dimension, and it barely mentions any math. However, there are two things I find interesting about it.
One is... (more) |
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Schild's Ladder (2002) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
Far in the future, the mathematical theory of "quantum graph theory" is the theory of
physics. Unlike the current theories of relativity and quantum physics,
which are obviously approximations that... (more) |
|
|
Schwarzschild Radius (1987) |
|
| Connie Willis |
|
Connie Willis' short-story ``Schwarzschild Radius'' is based on events
in the life of Karl Schwarzschild, who gave the first exact solutions
to the equations of general relativity. The
historical aspects... (more) |
|
|
Science Fiction Puzzle Tales (1981) |
|
| Martin Gardner |
|
This is the first collection of science fiction puzzles which Martin Gardner wrote for the Issac Asimov Science Fiction Magazine. A number of these puzzles are mathematical, all very enjoyable. The preface:
When... (more) |
|
|
The Second Moon (1939) |
|
| Russell R. Winterbotham |
|
This is one wreckage of a story; bad pulp fiction written way back when. It does have one or two decent points for an alert reader, like the observation that the presence of complex numbers in physical... (more) |
|
|
The Secret Number (2000) |
|
| Igor Teper |
|
In this very cute story, a mathematician who believes that there is an integer between 3 and 4 tries to convince his psychiatrist that he is not crazy. The idea is not very deep, but it is well handled... (more) |
|
|
Security (1953) |
|
| Poul Anderson |
|
A top secret project uses some mathematical physics to create a new material. As the title makes clear, the secrecy (and what the head of the project is willing to do to achieve it) is really the point... (more) |
|
|
Self-Reference ENGINE (2007) |
|
| Toh EnJoe |
|
As of 2015, the work of fiction which made physicist Toh EnJoe a famous author in Japan is finally available in English translation. The separate pieces are not quite short stories, and the whole is not... (more) |
|
|
A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions (1991) |
|
| Kim Stanley Robinson |
|
This work of speculative fiction is not a traditional work of fiction with a plot and characters, but reads more like an essay about the chaotic nature of reality which includes some alternative histories... (more) |
|
|
The Seventh Stair (1961) |
|
| Frank Brandon |
|
Let this be a cautionary tale for all those who have not focused on polishing their mathematics skills. Someday, you may not be able to save a friend for lack of a suitable algebraic equation… As... (more) |
|
|
Shaffery Among the Immortals (1972) |
|
| Frederik Pohl |
|
A funny yarn about one Jeremy Shaffery, an astronomer who idolizes Einstein and his methods and who wants to achieve immortal fame by doing something just as famous. The problem is that he is not built... (more) |
|
|
The Shape of Things (1948) |
|
| Ray Bradbury |
|
Neither Peter Horn nor his wife ever expected that their child would be a small blue pyramid of another dimension!
The story is a very poignant vignette of a pregnant woman, Polly, who, through... (more) |
|
|
Shell (1987) |
|
| Stephen Baxter |
|
Humanity, trapped and quarantined by the Xeelee in hyperspace (see "Stephen Baxter - The Eighth Room"), live on a spherical world apparently surrounded by a huge shell. The Shell harbors life and a group... (more) |
|
|
The Shiloh Project (1993) |
|
| David R. Beaucage |
|
This is a Christian science fiction novel with mathematical undertones written by an author with a doctorate in mathematics. In it, a Jewish math teacher falsely accused of sexually abusing a student... (more) |
|
|
Sidewise in Time (1934) |
|
| Murray Leinster |
|
"The protagonist is a frustrated mathematician, whose genius
(which Leinster makes some attempt to convey) is not recognized
by his teachers and peers. So when reality goes... (more) |
|
|
The Sigma Structure Symphony (2012) |
|
| Gregory Benford |
|
This story about humans in the distant future communicating with alien intelligences contains a lot of familiar ideas and some interesting new ones.
Ruth Angle is an employee at the SETI library on... (more) |
|
|
Signal to Noise (1999) |
|
| Eric S. Nylund |
|
The protagonist in this science fiction novel, Jack Potter, is a tenure track math professor in a future where San Francisco has sunk under the ocean, all non-academic employment in the United States... (more) |
|
|
Silence Please (1954) |
|
| Arthur C. Clarke |
|
In this
"White Hart" story, Purvis tells about an experimental
physicist who invents a highly successful antinoise generator.
The Fourier analysis underpinning of antinoise is explicitly
... (more) |
|
|
Silicon Muse (1984) |
|
| Hilbert Schenck |
|
Schenck's other Analog story would provide a geometric means of analyzing this one, but that is not why it is listed here. The story is about a computer that can write fiction about a computer that can... (more) |
|
|
The Simplest Equation (2014) |
|
| Nicky Drayden |
|
Mariah is a Stanford University math major who has lost her interest in the subject of mathematics. She is initially annoyed when Kwalla takes the seat next to hers in class. Kwalla is an alien with... (more) |
|
|
Simpsons (Episode: Homer3) (1995) |
|
| John Swarzwelder / Steve Tomkins / David S. Cohen |
|
In this segment from an episode of "The Simpsons" cartoon, Homer finds a
portal to the third dimension while trying to hide from his
sisters-in-law. This is a joke on the fact that they are usually... (more) |
|
|
Singer Distance (2022) |
|
| Ethan Chatagnier |
|
At the beginning of this novel, MIT math grad student Crystal Singer and a group of her friends are on a road trip to Arizona where they plan to carve a giant message to the inhabitants of Mars. Singer... (more) |
|
|
Singleton (2002) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
This story involves a physicist and a mathematician who have a child -- well, sort of -- that they have specially designed to remain in a "classical" state (as opposed to a quantum superposition of states)... (more) |
|
|
The Singularities (2022) |
|
| John Banville |
|
This ambitious novel may be the capstone to the body of work by the critically acclaimed Irish author John Banville. The closing words suggest that it is a finale to his career. And a clever plot conceit... (more) |
|
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|
|
Skylark of Valeron (1934) |
|
| E. E. Doc Smith |
|
At first I was completely confused while reading this novel, until I read it through my pulp-fiction-of-the-thirties lens. Then it became fun and hilarious. Scientists are unemotional and ruthless;... (more) |
|
|
A Slight Miscalculation (1971) |
|
| Ben Bova |
|
This is a story of a mathematician who found a way to predict
earthquakes. He finds out that there will be a major earthquake
in California (where he lives). After checking this prediction
using CalTech's... (more) |
|
|
The Smithsonian Institution (1998) |
|
| Gore Vidal |
|
In the year 1939, a 13 year old orphan known only as "T." is recruited into a secret project to build a nuclear weapon
after he is recognized by his algebra teacher as a math genius. From that description,... (more) |
|
|
Snow (1998) |
|
| Geoffrey A. Landis |
|
An apparently schizophrenic, homeless woman sells her body to get herself and her infant off the street on a cold night. Only at the end of this extremely short story do we realize that the imaginary... (more) |
|
|
The Snowball Effect (1952) |
|
| Katherine Maclean |
|
A comedic look at how experiments, particularly those in which the researcher has little control over the variables, can get out of hand like an uncontrolled chain-reaction with hilarious effects.
Prof.... (more) |
|
|
Solar Lottery (1955) |
|
| Philip K. Dick |
|
In the future, the "Minimax Game" runs society. New mind
technologies are used to take randomization stategies to previously unsuspected heights, in order to get an edge in the Game.
Explicit mentions... (more) |
|
|
Solenoid (2015) |
|
| Mircea Cartarescu |
|
In this surrealistic existentialist novel, a school teacher in Romania (who has much in common with the author) seeks to escape from his boring life. A solenoid built into the foundation of his new house... (more) |
|
|
Solid Geometry (1976) |
|
| Ian McEwan |
|
This short story from McEwan's award winning first collection is about a man who becomes learns some topology from his grandfather's journals...but not your average topology. The Victorian journals include... (more) |
|
|
Somnium (1634) |
|
| Johannes Kepler |
|
"Published posthumously, it is a short story about a dream
of life on the moon. There is no mathematical content in
the actual story, but Kepler included voluminous notes, plus
... (more) |
|
|
Souls in the Great Machine (1999) |
|
| Sean McMullen |
|
A thousand years in our future, civilization on Earth has been restarted from scratch following a combination of global warming, nuclear winter, and a mysterious periodic phenomenon known as "the Call".... (more) |
|
|
Space Bender (1928) |
|
| Edward Rementer |
|
This is another story which uses the convenient device of the fourth dimension for rapid spatial transport. This time, Prof. Jason Livermore is the one who disappears entirely from the face of the earth... (more) |
|
|
Spaceland (2002) |
|
| Rudy Rucker |
|
Yet another Flatland "sequel" in which silicon valley genius Joe Cube (an obvious reference to characters A. Square and A. Cube in Abbott's original) gets caught up in a war between four-dimensional beings... (more) |
|
|
Spacetime Donuts (1981) |
|
| Rudy Rucker |
|
The story is set in a chaotic setting (it's a Rucker novel!) of an all-providing-but-oppressive society. The society is controlled in large parts by a supercomputer, PhizWhiz, and its political masters.... (more) |
|
|
The Spacetime Pool (2008) |
|
| Catherine Asaro |
|
Janelle, recently graduated from MIT with a degree in math, is pulled through the "branch cut" between two universes to an alternate Earth where two sword wielding brothers rule half the world. There,... (more) |
|
|
Sphere (1989) |
|
| Michael Crichton |
|
In Sphere the team assembled to confront the unimaganible crisis is made up of specialists in specific fields, among these specialists there is a Mathematical prodigy who uses mathematical deductive... (more) |
|
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|
|
Spherical Harmonic (2001) |
|
| Catherine Asaro |
|
As a child, Dyhianna Selei created a transformation, just a mathematical construct, mapping the real world into an abstract space of "thoughts" (whatever that means) spanned by an infinite set of spherical... (more) |
|
|
The Square Cube Law (1952) |
|
| Fletcher Pratt |
|
JBS Haldane once wrote a wonderful article, “On Being the Right Size”, which can be found in James Newman’s “The World of Mathematics, Vol 2”. It encapsulates beautifully the idea that biologically,... (more) |
|
|
The Square Root of Pythagoras (1999) |
|
| Paul Di Filippo/Rudy Rucker |
|
Pythagoras has been granted the magical power of five numbers.
Along the way he discusses his theorem, the five Platonic solids,
and his general philosophy about numbers and the universe. But
he... (more) |
|
|
The Square Root of Summer (2016) |
|
| Harriet Reuter Hapgood |
|
In this young adult novel, a mathematically inclined teenager who ignores the sad events she does not want to remember learns to deal with them by literally revisiting her past through wormholes.
There... (more) |
|
|
Stamping Butterflies (2004) |
|
| Jon Courtenay Grimwood |
|
A "going back to change the timelines" SF story involving a reclusive rock star, a suspected terrorist being subjected to harsh tactics by US intelligence, and the young Chinese emperor who rules thousands... (more) |
|
|
The Star (1897) |
|
| Herbert George Wells |
|
Although some of the science is a bit off -- for example, the idea that the
rotation of planets has something to do with their ability to orbit the sun
or that the "star" formed by the collision of Neptune... (more) |
|
|
The Star Dummy (1952) |
|
| Anthony Boucher |
|
I learned duodecimal (and the whole
concept of number bases) from "The Star Dummy," by Boucher, in
Conklin's Omnibus of Science Fiction. The teddybear-shaped six-
fingered alien was trying to communicate with the koalas in the zoo
until an open-minded human showed up and the two traded written
numbers.
Originally published in Fantastic in 1952.
(more) |
|
|
Star, Bright (1952) |
|
| Mark Clifton |
|
How would you feel if your daughter could make deep mathematical
discoveries, even when she was a toddler? If you were the parent of
little Star in this story, you'd feel a combination of pride and... (more) |
|
|
Starman Jones (1953) |
|
| Robert A. Heinlein |
|
These adventures of Max Jones, a boy who runs away from Ozark home and works his way up the ranks of a starship is a nice example of classical science fiction as well as being a bit mathematical.
The... (more) |
|
|
Statistician's Day (1970) |
|
| James Blish |
|
An aging novelist and Nobel Prize winner gives what he knows is
his last interview. But rather than take questions, he has rather
pointed ones of his own, based on his twenty years of statistical
analyses... (more) |
|
|
The Statistomat Pitch (1958) |
|
| Chandler Davis |
|
This pulp science fiction story by "Chan Davis" features a discussion of the use of mathematics and a computer for the purposes of stock trading. As Vijay Fafat explains below in his post, while this... (more) |
|
|
The Stochastic Man (1975) |
|
| Robert Silverberg |
|
This is a tautly written story of political intrigue involving 3 central figures: a student of statistics, Lew Nichols, who invents the field of predictive stochastics, a seemingly clairvoyant and eccentric... (more) |
|
|
Storm: The Chronicles of Pandarve (1993) |
|
| Martin Lodewijk (writer) / Don Lawrence (artist) |
|
Storm was a long-running Dutch science fiction comic book series that was also serialized in many English publications.
Mathematics arose in a subplot where the living planet, Pandarve, is distracted... (more) |
|
|
Story of Your Life (1998) |
|
| Ted Chiang |
|
What sort of mathematics would Vonnegut's Tralfamadorean's like to do? Or,
alternatively, what sort of worldview would a sentient species have if their idea of simple mathematics was the calculus of... (more) |
|
|
Strange Attractors (1990) |
|
| William Sleator |
|
Time-travel story for young adolescents with a little bit of chaotic
dynamical systems thrown in. The plot follows Max, a high school student
with an interest in math and science, as he becomes involved... (more) |
|
|
Strange Attractors (2013) |
|
| Charles Soule (author) / Greg Scott (Illustrator) |
|
This is is graphic novel in which a mathematics student seeks the help of a seemingly insane genius who claims he has been using chaos theory to save the city of New York from disaster for decades.
Heller... (more) |
|
|
A Subway Named Moebius (1950) |
|
| A.J. Deutsch |
|
When the MBTA (Boston's Public Transportation authority) introduces a
new line, the topology of the network become so complex that a train
vanishes...lost in some fourth dimensional properties of the... (more) |
|
|
Summer Solstice (1985) |
|
| Charles Leonard Harness |
|
I did enjoy reading this short story (nominated for a Nebula award in 1985)
in which the famous Greek mathematician Eratosthenes determines the Earth's
circumference and meets a shipwrecked alien, but... (more) |
|
|
Summer Wars (2009) |
|
| Mamoru Hosoda (Director) |
|
Kenji is a part-time computer programmer from a poor family who has never had a girlfriend. Aside from the fact that he was almost selected to represent Japan in the Mathematics Olympiad he considers... (more) |
|
|
Surfing through Hyperspace (2001) |
|
| Clifford Pickover |
|
FBI agents investigate the disappearance of people abducted into the fourth dimension. Along the way, the agents learn about degrees of freedom, quaternions, nonorientable surfaces, mathematics of hyperspheres, and numerous other mathematics relating to higher spatial geometries.
(more) |
|
|
Sushi Never Sleeps (2002) |
|
| Clifford Pickover |
|
A man and his custom built "girlfriend" visit the land of Fractalia in this bizarre SF novel featuring lots of mathematical concepts (and quite a few kinky concepts as well).
A society of sexy mathematicians... (more) |
|
|
Sword Game (1968) |
|
| H.H. Hollis |
|
A topologist manages to create a time-smeared tesseract whose interior moves extremely slowly through time (from our perspecctive) while the exterior moves at the normal pace. He uses the tesseract to... (more) |
|
|
Symposium (1974) |
|
| R.A. Lafferty |
|
This story consists of a philosophical discussion between characters with names like "Wye" and "Zed". A good bit of it is about mathematics and its foundations. For example:
"And, Zed," said O doubtfully,... (more) |
|
|
The Tachypomp (1873) |
|
| Edward Page Mitchell |
|
I can't believe this story is as old as it is! First published in
Scribner's Magazine in 1873, it is only dated by its sexism and its
contradition of Einstein. In order to win the hand of the beautiful
Abscissa... (more) |
|
|
The Tale of a Comet (1870) |
|
| Spencer Edward |
|
How many times have we wondered about the workings of dazzling, magical brains of the likes of Ramanujan? Of the potentially unearthly origins of brilliants intellects like Ed Witten? That perhaps one... (more) |
|
|
The Tale of the Big Computer (aka The End of Man?) (1966) |
|
| Hannes Alfven (writing as Olof Johannesson) |
|
"Alfven, the Swedish physicist and astrophysicist who was
awarded the Nobel prize for his development of plasma physics
and magnetohydrodynamics (but is perhaps better remembered
... (more) |
|
|
Tangents (1986) |
|
| Greg Bear |
|
There are far too many mathematical stories about finding a way to
travel into "other dimensions". Still, this one is one of my
favorites. Not only do we see a clever approach to this "old"
storyline,... (more) |
|
|
Tau Zero (1970) |
|
| Poul Anderson |
|
Special relativity takes center stage in this classic science-fiction
novel. So much so that the number tau, by which one must divide an
object's rest mass to determine its apparent mass when travelling... (more) |
|
|
Technical Error (1946) |
|
| Arthur C. Clarke |
|
During the last phases of construction, a huge supercooled superconducting generator is accidentally given a surge of current. At that moment, an engineer is at the center of its field and is somehow... (more) |
|
|
The Men who Murdered Mohammed (1958) |
|
| Alfred Bester |
|
A time-travel story in which Henry Hassel travels back in time to change the past (specifically, to kill his wife who has cheated on him), but finds that none of the usual time-travel tropes apply. In... (more) |
|
|
They'll Say It Was the Communists (2024) |
|
| Sarah Lazarz |
|
Women working as human "computers" for NASA in its early years discover that their boss is actually a tentacled creature who feasts on valid calculations and is repulsed by mathematical errors.
In addition... (more) |
|
|
The Third Party (2004) |
|
| David Moles |
|
Two conflicting groups of humans make contact with
a forgotten human world. One of the natives turns
out to be a brilliant mathematician, independently
discovering Cantor's diagonalization argument, and
is confused that a colleague considers it obvious.
This short story appeared in the September 2004 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. (more) |
|
|
Those Who Can, Do (1965) |
|
| Bob Kurosaka |
|
In this short-short classic, a mathematics professor ends the first day
of a Differential Equations class asking for questions. One student is
irksome, even peculiar, in his wish to know what practical... (more) |
|
|
Three Cornered Wheel (1963) |
|
| Poul Anderson |
|
Sometimes a surprising mathematical fact will inspire a science fiction story to illustrate it. I suspect that is what happened with this story that comes up with a contrived circumstance in which the... (more) |
|
|
The Three-Body Problem (2006) |
|
| Cixin Liu (author) / Ken Liu (translator) |
|
This creative "first contact" novel by a famous Chinese science fiction author won many awards, including the Hugo award.
Like much "hard SF", it is a work of fiction in which the ideas are at least... (more) |
|
|
Threshold (2006) |
|
| Bragi F. Schut/ Brannon Braga / David S. Goyer / Dan O'Shannon |
|
This science fiction TV series featured a sarcastic dwarf mathematician character. According to Mathematics Goes to the Movies, mathematical highlights included a 4-dimensional alien object intersecting our world in the first episode, references to "isomorphic group therapy [sic]", "monotonic null sequences" and "quadratic reciprocity" in the second, and a strange statistical study in the 11th.
(more) |
|
|
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (2015) |
|
| Sydney Padua |
|
This graphic novel starts out as a basically realistic fictionalized biography of the 19th century mathematicians Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, even if it is a biography with a snarky sense of humor.... (more) |
|
|
Through the Black Board (1943) |
|
| Joel Rogers |
|
The tagline of the story says:
“Unexpectedly Tossed into the Fourth Dimension, Little Mathematics Professor Noel Gouf Has an Amazing Chance to Solve All of His Persona! Problems While Time Stands... (more) |
|
|
Through the Gates of the Silver Key (1934) |
|
| H.P. Lovecraft / E. Hoffmann Price |
|
"We read of the fantastic travels of the dreamer and mystic Randolph Carter as he
arrives at the Ultimate Gate separating the parallel dimensions and alternate
realities
of the Universe. The Gate... (more) |
|
|
Tiger by the Tail (1951) |
|
| A.G. Nourse |
|
A pocketbook contains a gateway to another universe, and a group of unlikely heroes tries to save ours from the aliens there by reaching in and grabbing it.
This is a cute short story, with a not-particularly-sound... (more) |
|
|
The Time Axis (1949) |
|
| Henry Kuttner |
|
This was published as an Ace paperback in 1965. I don't think I have a copy of the paperback in my collection, but I have the original magazine publication, in the January 1949 issue of Startling Stories.... (more) |
|
|
The Time Machine (1895) |
|
| Herbert George Wells |
|
This famous early science fiction novel opens with a clever (and, if you
think ahead to the role of Minkowski Space in special relativity,
prophetic) lecture on "the fourth dimension". Of course, discussions... (more) |
|
|
The Time Ships (1995) |
|
| Stephen Baxter |
|
This sequel to H.G. Wells' classic "The Time Machine" updates the story with some quantum mechanics and general relativity that were not available to Wells in 1895.
Our narrator returns to the distant... (more) |
|
|
Time Travel for Love and Profit (2021) |
|
| Sarah Lariviere |
|
Nephele Weather's nerdy tendencies made her an outcast at school. Since her "only superpower is math", she decides to discover the equations of time travel so that she can repeat her freshman year and... (more) |
|
|
Time, Like an Ever Rolling Stream (1992) |
|
| Judith Moffett |
|
The aliens have come to save us from ourselves (which they do by passing environmental laws and sterilizing all humans to prevent overpopulation). One of the aliens, as a pet project, recruits eight young... (more) |
|
|
Timescape (1979) |
|
| Gregory Benford |
|
On the positive side, we have a clever idea that shows some of the flavor of
modern mathematical physics, some positive comments about mathematics and
mathematical name-dropping, and even some mathematical... (more) |
|
|
To Hold Infinity (1998) |
|
| John Meaney |
|
Meaney's first novel, which only saw its US release in 2006, is not quite as mathematical as some of his later books, but the foundations are there. We encounter "mu-space" (additional spatial dimensions... (more) |
|
|
To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998) |
|
| Connie Willis |
|
Travelling through time, as we all know, is a dangerous business. One small change in the past and you could mess up the future! In this science fiction novel, Willis proposes a (vaguely mathematical)... (more) |
|
|
To The Power Against (2007) |
|
| Carrie Smith (writer) / Stephanie Lantry (Artist) |
|
Probability and the number 235 (which appears on each cover, sometimes cleverly hidden) each play a role in this interesting but still somewhat amateurish comic book series from Conjoined Comics.
Our... (more) |
|
|
To Walk the Night (1937) |
|
| William Sloane |
|
A beautifully written horror tale in which vague references to equations are used to explain the mysterious death of a researcher who believed he proved Einstein wrong and the subsequent suicide of his colleague. The book is narrated in a quaintly old-fashioned style by the colleague's best friend and a key character is the lovely but apparently inhuman woman who was married to each victim. (more) |
|
|
Topsy-turvy (Sans Dessus Dessous) (1889) |
|
| Jules Verne |
|
The members of the Gun Club want to use a giant cannon's recoil to change the Earth's rotation axis, so they can exploit the presumed coalfields at the North Pole. An unfortunate side effect is that... (more) |
|
|
Touching Centauri (2003) |
|
| Stephen Baxter |
|
A mathematician solves Fermi's paradox, and then actually
*does* something about it, with immense consequences.
Originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction August 2003. Republished in the Baxter compilation "Phase Space".
Very entertaining. Deals with some deep topics
(more) |
|
|
The Tower of Babylon (2002) |
|
| Ted Chiang |
|
There really is almost no mathematics in this bizarre story that hauntingly
combines
religion with science fiction. However, the "punchline" is entirely
topological in nature.
This story can be... (more) |
|
|
Transition Dreams (1993) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
Transition dreams, an old man learns in this story, are dreams that your new, robotic brain has as it is being "filled up" with the patterns copied from your old, organic brain. There is a good deal of... (more) |
|
|
The Translated Man (2009) |
|
| Chris Braak |
|
Since the horrific Excelsior disaster, the subject of aetheric geometry has been banned. The ethical dilema for a young psychic is whether he should reveal to the detective he is assisting the tremendous... (more) |
|
|
Tre per zero (1997) |
|
| T. Sclavi (writer) / B. Brindisi (artist) |
|
An Italian comic book whose title translates as "Three Times Zero".
A very surreal story where a (stereotypical but non-trivial) mathematician "discovers" that
three times zero equal three, and we... (more) |
|
|
El Troiacord (2001) |
|
| Miquel de Palol |
|
It would be an understatement to refer to this massive novel as "complex". Written in Catalan and never translated (not even into Spanish), it is often published in multiple volumes. Adding the intricacy... (more) |
|
|
Trouble on Triton (1976) |
|
| Samuel R. Delany |
|
Originally published under the shorter title Triton, this "hard SF" novel uses mathematical concepts as part of its description of life for human colonists on the moon Triton. One of the main characters... (more) |
|
|
Turing (A Novel About Computation) (2003) |
|
| Christos Papadimitriou |
|
The four vertices of an unlikely love "rectangle" are (a) a dying, maverick cryptographer, (b) a pregnant Internet wiz, (c) a romantic middle-aged Greek archaeologist and (d) Turing, an artificially intelligent... (more) |
|
|
The Turing Option (1992) |
|
| Harry Harrison / Marvin Minksy |
|
A mathematical prodigy uses his expertise in artificial intelligence to repair his own brain after he is shot in the head in this novel by famed AI researcher Marvin Minsky together with science fiction... (more) |
|
|
Turing's Apples (2008) |
|
| Stephen Baxter |
|
Story about a far-away civilization transmitting a complex message in all directions, containing a software program (“Turing machine”) which ends up creating von Neumann machines with one... (more) |
|
|
Turnabout (1955) |
|
| Gordon R. Dickson |
|
It's a story about a physics professor who is investigating a device that creates planar force-fields. In its first run, an explosion destroys the device and the physicist is trying to obtain an answer... (more) |
|
|
Twisters (1988) |
|
| Paul J. Nahin |
|
A medical doctor stumbles onto a dangerous trap in this short story which
was published in Analog (Vol CVIII No 6, May 1988). The twisted
donuts sold by the new shop he passes on the way to work turn out to be
Klein bottles (a topological oddity like the Mobius strip). (more) |
|
|
The Ultimate Analysis (1944) |
|
| John Russell Fearn |
|
This one is a hurriedly thrown together mish-mash of mathematical statements which make no sense when examined individually but taken together, form a breathless pulp story about a mathematician who... (more) |
|
|
The Ultimate Crime (1976) |
|
| Isaac Asimov |
|
We all know that Sherlock Holmes' arch enemy was a mathematician,
right? (If not, check out Sherlock Holmes.)
In fact, his second famous paper was on the dynamics of an asteroid.
Now, you may ask,... (more) |
|
|
Understand (1991) |
|
| Ted Chiang |
|
"An experimental treatment for a drowning victim turns him into
an incredible supergenius. Mathematics is mentioned several
times in passing, and twice the supergenius explicitly uses it
... (more) |
|
|
The Universal Library [Die Universalbibliothek] (1901) |
|
| Kurd Lasswitz |
|
This early "science fiction" story explores the notion of a library containing every possible five hundred page book and an English translation appears in the classic mathematical fiction collection Fantasia... (more) |
|
|
The Universe Broke Down (1941) |
|
| Robert Arthur |
|
Jeremiah Jupiter was an extremely rich, eccentric genius who built an antenna which could take some strange meteorite material called “magna” and amplify cosmic rays to disintegrate the magna, giving... (more) |
|
|
Unreasonable Effectiveness (2003) |
|
| Alex Kasman |
|
"Unreasonable Effectiveness" reminds me of a classic Arthur C. Clarke style
short story. It has exactly enough mathematics done correctly and a twist that
boggles the mind at the end. To be fair... (more) |
|
|
Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies (1992) |
|
| Greg Egan |
|
"Originally published in Interzone #61, July 1992. Because of an accident,
people's values and beliefs, and convictions, became completely permeable
to one another. So people start clumping according... (more) |
|
|
The Unteleported Man (aka Lies Inc.) (1964) |
|
| Philip K. Dick |
|
In the future, earth is overcrowded, and nearly the only
relief is provided by one-way teleportation to a star
system
several light years away,... (more) |
|
|
The Unwilling Professor (1954) |
|
| Arthur Porges |
|
Two college students who are failing their math class kidnap an alien they encounter and force it to do homework for everyone in their fraternity.
There are some cute mathematical passages. For example,... (more) |
|
|
Vampire World (Trilogy) (1993) |
|
| Brian Lumley |
|
In these sequels to Necroscope, the twin sons of Harry Keogh living in the remains of a black hole continue to fight vampires. One of the sons has visions of a "vortex of numbers". He seeks the assistance... (more) |
|
|
The Vanishing Man (1926) |
|
| Richard Hughes |
|
A very flimsy, lazy “story” about a professor who was writing a book called, “Multidimensional Perspective” with the narrator, and in the course of his investigations, found the fourth dimension,... (more) |
|
|
Vanishing Point (1959) |
|
| C.C. Beck |
|
The short story is another take on the true nature of reality and one man's quest to unmask it. It is more an idea piece than a full-fledged development. An artist, Carter, who is a trained mathematician... (more) |
|
|
Vault of the Beast (1940) |
|
| Alfred Elton van Vogt |
|
"A creature of vast powers is locked up inside a vault made up of
ultimate metal. The key to freeing it turns out to be 'factoring
the ultimate prime number', which procedure is given an extended
pseudomathematical... (more) |
|
|
A Very Good Year (1984) |
|
| Jack C. Haldeman (II) |
|
A very short fantasy-like story about Statistics. A senior statistician for Dept of Acccident Prevention describes how the law of averages appears to have failed when applied to mortality rates. In particular,... (more) |
|
|
A Victim of Higher Space (1917) |
|
| Algernon Blackwood |
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This is another of the John Silence tall-tales, this time involving a man who learns to visualize 4-dimensional space and then starts slipping in and out of the hyperspace. As he describes it,
"This... (more) |
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Void Star (2017) |
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| Zachary Mason |
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This is a beautifully written and deep work of near-future science fiction about the development of an amazingly powerful sort of artificial intelligence. Two of the characters are mathematical both in name and perspective: Thales is a mathematically inclined Brazilian billionaire who encounters a mysterious AI which calls itself "the mathematician". (more) |
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The Wall of Darkness (1946) |
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| Arthur C. Clarke |
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In a universe consisting of one star and one planet, there is a
mysterious impenetrable wall surrounding the entire planet in the deep
freezing southlands. Two men, one with money, the other... (more) |
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Wang's Carpets (1995) |
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| Greg Egan |
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This short story about a life form based on Wang Tiles first appeared in 1995 in Greg Bear's New Legends collection but was later expanded into an entire novel. For more information, see my entry on the... (more) |
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We (1924) |
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| Yevgeny Zamyatin |
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Like 1984, We is a book about a utopia gone wrong. In fact, it is acknowledged as a source which Orwell used when writing his more famous dystopian novel. (We was written in Russian in 1921, published... (more) |
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What Dead Men Tell (1949) |
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| Theodore Sturgeon |
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A supergenius discovers a secret society amongst us that
is guarding the secret of immortality. He elects to take
their entry examination, which has immediate death as the
price... (more) |
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What Happened at Cambridge IV (1990) |
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| David Langford |
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This is another BLIT story by David Langford; this time, a brilliant mathematician working on a neuro-mathematical model of the brain finds a type of visual input that doesn't just slow it down but causes... (more) |
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The Whisper of Disks (2002) |
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| John Meaney |
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I found this to be a strange story. It switches between a few time periods in the future and in the past. The present is about a young girl, Augusta - “Gus” - who develops over time into a math and... (more) |
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White Light, or What is Cantor's Continuum Problem? (1980) |
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| Rudy Rucker |
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I think the best description of this book is Naked Lunch
meets The Wild Numbers, with a cameo appearance by
Donald Duck's nephews. Happily, this book has recently been rereleased
(2001) in a new format... (more) |
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White Mars : or, the mind set free : a 21st Century Utopia (2000) |
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| Brian Wilson Aldiss / Roger Penrose |
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It's not everyday that a mathematician of Penrose's calibre is listed
as a coauthor on a science fiction novel. Although he is probably
best known to the general public for the Penrose Tiling (a set... (more) |
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White Rabbit, Red Wolf [This Story is a Lie] (2018) |
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| Tom Pollock |
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Seventeen-year-old Peter Blankman is afraid of most things, but he loves his mother (a famous research psychologist), his twin sister (a tough girl who looks out for him), and math. So, he is in trouble... (more) |
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The Whole Mess (2016) |
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| Jack Skillingstead |
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By solving a mathematical equation brought to him by a young stranger, a math professor allows the squid-like "Masters" to enter our universe, leaving havoc in their wake. The professor finds himself... (more) |
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The Woman in Schrödinger's Wave Equations (2005) |
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| Eugene Mirabelli |
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The artist girlfriend of a grad student working in theoretical physics becomes interested in determining something about the mysterious woman with whom Erwin Schrödinger supposedly had an extra-marital... (more) |
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The Woman Who Shook the World-Tree (2012) |
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| Michael Swanwick |
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A mathematical prodigy (she derived her own version of calculus to compute volumes when she was only seven years old, and by age 18 she had three PhD.s, including one in a field she had invented) teams... (more) |
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A Wrinkle in Time (1962) |
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| Madeleine L'Engle |
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In this classic children's adventure story,
"time travel is explained as a tesseract, a five dimensional figure. By
traveling along the tesseract, one bypasses the space in between."
Usually,... (more) |
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The Writing on the Wall (2005) |
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| Steve Stanton |
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When he was eight years old, David was visited by an image of his future self, causing him to write mathematical formulas on the wall. (Unfortunately, his parents paint over it before he has a chance... (more) |
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WWW: Wake (2009) |
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| Robert J. Sawyer |
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A blind math prodigy uses her ability to "see" what is going on in the Internet (watch out for the pun: Websight) to discover the emergence of a virtual life form. This is a solid and very readable hard... (more) |
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The Year of the Jackpot (1952) |
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| Robert A. Heinlein |
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A statistician notices trends in everything from war and famine to women unexpectedly stripping off their clothes in public. He concludes that the year 1954 is going to be an exceptionally bad year. ... (more) |
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Ylem (1994) |
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| Eliot Fintushel |
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Another Fintushel Big-Bang-And-Back Totally-Weird adventure,
the plot concerns a business conflict in the helium market.
Somebody dickered with the primordial nucleosynthesis, and
... (more) |
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Young Beaker (1973) |
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| J.T. Lamberty, Jr. |
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A singular individual who knows how to do mental arithmetic triumphs over peers in a future where everyone has become dependent on calculators and computers. That description would apply equally to this... (more) |
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Zero Sum Game (2018) |
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| S.L. Huang |
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Cas Russell is violent and amoral. She is also really good at math. Her understanding of physics and quick work with vectors allows her to do things like ricochet a tossed cell phone just right to knock... (more) |
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The Zero Theorem (2013) |
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| Pat Rushin (screenplay) / Terry Gilliam (director) |
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Qohen Leth corrects people who call him a number cruncher: he's an entity cruncher. Even though he is very good at his job, processing data in the office at his company's famous cube-based computer terminals,... (more) |
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