 |
The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri (2008) |
 | David Bajo |
|
Philip is a mathematician who works in the financial industry, a quant. We also meet his ex-wife, Rebecca, who is a math professor. But, the main character in this novel is a woman who we only meet in... (more) |
|
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36 Arguments for the Existence of God (2010) |
 | Rebecca Goldstein |
|
This new novel by Rebecca Goldstein, whose Strange Attractors is one of my favorite works of mathematical fiction, features as two main characters a woman known as "the goddess of game theory" and a Hasidic... (more) |
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4.50 from Paddington (1957) |
|
| Agatha Christie |
|
A suggestion for your site: In the Agatha Christie novel 4.50 from Paddington an important role is played by Lucy Eyelesbarrow, a woman in her thirties who has a First in Maths from Oxford. She declined... (more) |
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7 Steps to Midnight (1993) |
|
| Richard Matheson |
|
In this unnerving, `Kafka-esque' suspense novel by well known horror author Richard Matheson, a government mathematician sees reality collapse around him as his life is turned into a surrealistic version... (more) |
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Abendland (Occident) (2007) |
|
| Michael Köhlmeier |
|
The protagonist is an Austrian
mathematician who, according to the fictional invention of the author,
worked with Emmy Noether in Göttingen during the 'Golden Age' of
German Mathematics, i.e. before Hitler came to power. In chapter 6 we
learn a lot about Noether's life in Göttingen, Moscow, and the US.
(more) |
|
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The Absolute Value of Mike (2011) |
|
| Kathryn Erskine |
|
Mike is a fourteen-year-old with dyscalculia, but his father is a professional mathematician and is quite insistent that he should learn math and go to Newton High, the math magnet school. According to... (more) |
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An Abundance of Katherines (2006) |
|
| John Green |
|
Colin Singleton is a semi-burnt-out child prodigy who spends a summer coming of age as he develops a theorem to account for the fact that he's been dumped by nineteen girls, all named Katherine. Includes... (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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According to the Law (1996) |
|
| Solvej Balle |
|
Four interconnected stories are told which wrap around onto themselves like a M¨bius strip. But, it is not only the structure of the story that is mathematical. In the first we meet a biochemist... (more) |
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Account Unsettled [Crime Impuni] (1954) |
|
| Georges Simenon |
|
Elie is a Polish Jew who has come to study math in pre-war France. He is noticeably anti-social and awkward. He seems to be aware of the landlady's daughter, but neither to be in love with her nor sexually... (more) |
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Ada's Room (2023) |
|
| Sharon Dodo Otoo |
|
This novel follows a woman's soul through four reincarnations, beginning in Africa in the 15th century and ending in Europe during World War II. All four are named "Ada", and one of them happens to be... (more) |
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Advanced Calculus of Murder (1988) |
|
| Erik Rosenthal |
|
In the second book in the Dan Brodsky series (following Calculus of Murder by the same author), Brodsky is invited to COTCA (the Conference on Operator Theory and C*-Algebras at Oxford University). While... (more) |
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The Adventures of a University Math Professor (2001) |
|
| Donald A. Buckeye |
|
This slim book is a very easy, unassuming, pleasant read which adults and sixth graders can both read with joy. It is an autobiographical fictionalization of some parts of a mathematics teacher's life.... (more) |
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After Math (1997) |
|
| Miriam Webster |
|
The ghost of math professor Ray Bellwether tries to solve the mystery of
his own murder in this `first novel' by Amy Babich (Webster is just a
pseudonym). Babich has a Ph.D. in mathematics (and a Master's... (more) |
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After Math (2013) |
|
| Denise Grover Swank |
|
This is a young adult novel about a college math major, a typical nerd with some apparent neuroses, who learns to be much more "normal" when she is forced to tutor a popular male soccer player.
Thanks to my student, Madeline Goodman, for bringing this book to my attention. (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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Against the Day (2006) |
|
| Thomas Pynchon |
|
This novel, set in the time frame 1890s to 1920s interleaves several
plots and styles, from boys' adventures to peacetime spies to gunslingers'
revenges. The forces of progress stomp over all the... (more) |
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Ahmes, the Moonchild (2010) |
|
| Tefcros Michaelides |
|
The Rhind Papyrus is an Egyptian document from around 1550 BC featuring worked math problems. Its author (usually transliterated into Roman characters as Ahmes or Ahmose) is arguably the most ancient... (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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Alexander's Infinity (2021) |
|
| Lidija Stankovikj |
|
This novel describes the spiritual journey of "a middle-aged Scandinavian mathematician with a bent for the metaphysical" to India and Burma. I have not yet had a chance to read it, but the author has lived in India, Burma, and Sweden and holds a degree in mathematics, so she should at least know something about those aspects of the plot.
(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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The Alice Network (2017) |
|
| Kate Quinn |
|
Set in the aftermath of World War II, The Alice Network follows a Bennington College sophomore Charlotte “Charlie” St. Clair on an impromptu search for her cherished cousin Rose. While fleeing... (more) |
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All Cry Chaos (2011) |
|
| Leonard Rosen |
|
When a mathematician is killed in an explosion immediately before presenting his paper on the inevitability of a one-world economy to the World Trade Organization, the case falls to Interpol agent Henri... (more) |
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All Scot and Bothered (2020) |
|
| Kerrigan Byrne |
|
This is another romance novel set in the 19th century featuring a female mathematician. It features such lines as:
She had very few innate talents, but the rhythm and structure of sexual relations... (more) |
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All the Light We Cannot See (2014) |
|
| Anthony Doerr |
|
Doerr's Pulitzer Prize winning novel follows two children in World War II, a blind French girl hiding with her father and a valuable jewel from the museum where he works and an orphaned German boy. When... (more) |
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The Almond Tree (2012) |
|
| Michelle Cohen Corasanti |
|
A poor Palestinian boy growing up in Israel during the 1950s and 1960s endures persecution but eventually becomes a successful scientific researcher because of his mathematical skills.
The author, who... (more) |
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Alone with You in the Ether: A Love Story (2022) |
|
| Olivia Blake |
|
A bipolar artist and an obsessive mathematician who meet by chance get to know each other (and themselves) better through the course of six conversations. Although the artist already has a boyfriend,... (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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The Amber Shadows (2016) |
|
| Lucy Ribchester |
|
This is another thriller set at Bletchley Park during World War II. Many of the characters are described as mathematicians and Alan Turing is mentioned occasionally, but math is definitely not the center... (more) |
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Amy and Isabelle (1998) |
|
| Elizabeth Strout |
|
A highly praised mother-daughter novel, selected by Oprah, and
recently produced by Oprah as a made-for-TV movie.
Set in 1971 Maine, a 16-year-old girl has an affair with her
high school math... (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 Be a Villain (1948) |
|
| Rex Stout |
|
Rex
Stout and his seventy some Nero Wolfe novels are generally regarded as
amongst the greatest mystery novels ever written. They read as fresh today
as when the series started in 1934, and they... (more) |
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An Angel of Obedience (2010) |
|
| John Giessmann |
|
Due to his new obsession with fractal geometry, thirteen year-old prodigy Jackson Carter has just ended an illustrious career as a classical musician and enrolled as a math major at Harvard. There he... (more) |
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Annika Riz, Math Whiz (Franklin School Friends) (2014) |
|
| Claudia Mills |
|
Recently I have been looking for math books for my young children when I came across Annika Riz, Math Whiz by Claudia Mills. I checked the archives of your site and it appears that this book is not on... (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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Apeirogon: A Novel (2020) |
|
| Colum McCann |
|
This novel with a mathematical title is based on the real lives of two peace activists, Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian and Rami Elhanan, an Israeli, both fathers of young daughters who died violently in... (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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Arithmetic Town / Arithmetic (1996) |
|
| Todd McEwen |
|
This novel puts you into the stream of consciousness of Joe Lake, a boy growing up in California in the 1950s. For him, arithmetic represents all that is wrong with his world. It is difficult, ugly,... (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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The Art Student's War (2009) |
|
| Brad Leithauser |
|
In this novel, Bea Paradiso is an art student during World War II who makes portraits of wounded soldiers. (Not coincidentally, the author's mother-in-law did the same, and the book is enhanced by the... (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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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) |
|
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Bad Boy Brawley Brown (2002) |
|
| Walter Mosley |
|
This is the sixth book in the highly praised Easy Rawlins mysteries
that began with DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS. They are set in post-WWII
black Los Angeles, and unfold over the years. (The... (more) |
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The Banana Girls (2017) |
|
| Karim F. Hirji |
|
This rare example of African mathematical fiction was written by a Fellow of the Tanzania Academy of Sciences who previously won awards for his work on the statistical analysis of small sample discrete... (more) |
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The Bangalore Detectives Club (2022) |
|
| Harini Narendra |
|
On the first page of this mystery set in 1920's India, a scrap of paper identifies the person a desperate character seeks:
MRS KAVERI MURTHY, Mathematician and Lady Detective.
The rest of the novel... (more) |
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Barking (2007) |
|
| Tom Holt |
|
Duncan Hughes has had a rather monotonous and trite career as an
estate and tax lawyer when suddenly werewolves, vampires, zombies,
and one impossibly alluring unicorn, along with his ex-wife and his
old... (more) |
|
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The Barking Clock (1947) |
|
| Harry Stephen Keeler / Hazel Goodwin Keeler |
|
Tuddleton T. Trotter, author of a book which claims that all criminal mysteries can be solved mathematically, has only hours to save Joe Czeszczicki, a death row inmate soon to be electrocuted for the... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
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The Bed and the Bachelor (2011) |
|
| Tracy Anne Warren |
|
Although it involves cryptography and the Napoleonic wars, this novel is really more of a romance than it is historical fiction or espionage.
Sebastianne Dumont is the daughter of a French mathematician... (more) |
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|
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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) |
|
|
The Better Mousetrap (2008) |
|
| Tom Holt |
|
The Better Mousetrap is the fifth book in Tom Holt's
series that began with The Portable Door. The first
four books told the adventures of Paul Carpenter, a fairly
boring nobody who joined the... (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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Beyond the Limit: The Dream of Sofya Kovalevskaya (2002) |
|
| Joan Spicci |
|
This book is a novelized account of the life of
Sofia Kovalevskaya (aka Sonia Kovalevskey and infinitely1 many alternative
spellings), famous today as the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in
mathematics.... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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 Bishop Murder Case (1928) |
|
| S.S. van Dine (pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright) |
|
Our hero, Vance, says at the end of this mystery novel: "At the outset I was able to postulate a mathematician as the criminal agent. The difficulty of naming the murderer lay in the fact that nearly... (more) |
|
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Black Numbers (2011) |
|
| Dean Frank Lappi |
|
In a fantasy world where math is magic, a young boy's life is endangered as it becomes clear that he is the long awaited Aleph Null.
I really do like the way the characters utilize equations and mentally... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Body Counter (2018) |
|
| Anne Frasier |
|
Detective Jude Fontaine must stop a pathological killer whose murder sprees are dictated by the Fibonacci sequence.
Fontaine is known for her ability to read people. (She often can tell when people... (more) |
|
|
The Body Outside the Kremlin (2020) |
|
| James L. May |
|
This novel is a combination of historical fiction and a murder mystery, with literary ambitions. The narrator is a former math student who is sent to an island prison in the early days of the USSR. There... (more) |
|
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Bone Chase (2020) |
|
| Weston Ochse |
|
Ethan McCloud discovers a massive conspiracy to hide a historical truth in an thriller that combines science and the Bible.
In this unsubtle attempt to create a new entry in the genre which achieved... (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) |
|
|
Bonita Avenue (2010) |
|
| Peter Buwalda |
|
This widely acclaimed and popular Dutch novel concerns a mathematician who is a sort of intellectual public figure that the United States does not seem to have. After winning the Fields Medal for his... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
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The Book of Getting Even (2009) |
|
| Benjamin Taylor |
|
A brilliant homosexual teenager uses mathematics as an escape from the pressures of everyday life, including his father, a rabbi in 1970's New Orleans. Along the way, he gets to know (and love, in a variety of ways) the family of a Nobel prize winning physicist and he himself becomes a cosmologist.
(more) |
|
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Book of Knut: a novel by Knut Knudson (2012) |
|
| Halvor Aakhus |
|
Halvor Aakhus, who has an undergraduate degree in math and an MFA in writing, wrote this unusual work of fiction that takes the form of a novel by an apparently dead author named Knut Knudson which has... (more) |
|
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The Boy Who Escaped Paradise (2016) |
|
| J.M. Lee (author) / Chi-Young Kim (translator) |
|
After a body is found surrounded by mathematical formulas in Queens, a young Korean man named Gil-Mo is arrested for the murder. Because of his autistic tendencies, he does not respond at all to the usual... (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Brazzaville Beach (1990) |
|
| William Boyd |
|
Main character is a women studying chimpanzees in Africa, but her
ex-husband is a set theorist who goes mad because he fails to prove a
theorem.
One of my favourite authors, and one of his best... (more) |
|
|
Break Your Heart (2015) |
|
| Rhonda Helms |
|
The cultural diversity in this romance novel about the affair between an African-American math major and her Japanese cryptography professor is a pleasant surprise, but that is just about the only positive thing I can think to say. It does not seem to have anything interesting to say about either mathematics or academia. They are just the backdrop for a forbidden erotic encounter. (more) |
|
|
The Brothers Karamazov (1880) |
|
| Fyodor Dostoevsky |
|
In this classic final masterwork by Dostoevsky, the existence of non-Euclidean geometry is mentioned at one point. Although the theme is not explicitly carried throughout the rest of the novel, it plays... (more) |
|
|
The Butterfly Effect (2001) |
|
| D.F. Roberts |
|
Only available for Kindle download as far as I can tell, this sexually explicit novel follows Dr. Martin Crowe as he ``uses chaos math'' (sounds unlikely!) to solve unusual problems for people, such as his ex-lover who is now being blackmailed by her ex-husband.
--Suggested for inclusion by Vijay Fafat. (more) |
|
|
A Calculated Demise (2007) |
|
| Robert Spiller |
|
A high school math teacher, Bonnie Pinkwater, solves the mystery surrounding the murder of a PE teacher, a student, and the family of the boy suspected in the killing.
This sequel to The Witch of Agnesi... (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 Magic (1995) |
|
| Robert Weinberg |
|
In this sequel to A Logical Magician, the mathematically trained wizard's assistant returns to fight evil monsters in Vegas and save his fiance (Merlin's daughter) from Hell.
I do like the idea that... (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) |
|
|
Calculus and Pizza (2003) |
|
| Clifford Pickover |
|
A pizza chef teaches calculus to his restaurant patrons. Romance and hilarity ensue.
(more) |
|
|
Calculus of Murder (1986) |
|
| Erik Rosenthal |
|
"The hero is a part-time instructor and
researcher at Berkeley and moonlights as a PI. He solves his cases
using calculus. The narrative is excellent, humorous, and believable."
Actually, I just... (more) |
|
|
The Cambridge Quintet (1999) |
|
| John L. Casti |
|
A group of famous historical figures, including Wittegenstein,
Schrödinger, J.B.S. Haldane, and Alan Turing meet at the home of
C.P. Snow to discuss the question of whether machines can think.
John... (more) |
|
|
The Cambridge Theorem (1990) |
|
| Tony Cape |
|
It is a British-Russian spy novel in the style of Le Carre that is set in Cambridge, UK. If you like that sort of thing, fine. It is true that the murdered genius is a math graduate student, and he leaves... (more) |
|
|
The Capacity for Infinite Happiness (2015) |
|
| Alexis von Konigslow |
|
A math grad student trying to start her thesis on graph theory discovers some of her family's secrets when visiting their resort in Canada.
Graph theory involves the study of vertices (points or dots)... (more) |
|
|
Carry On, Mr. Bowditch (1955) |
|
| Jean Lee Latham |
|
The life of early American mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch, famous for his work on techniques of navigation, is fictionalized in this novel for young adults. Although the mathematical details are not... (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) |
|
|
Case of Lies (2005) |
|
| Perri O'Shaughnessy |
|
An old, unsolved casino murder becomes mathematical when three of the witnesses turn out to have been math students using their skills to win at gambling. Quite a bit of detailed discussion of number... (more) |
|
|
The Case of the Flying Hands (2001) |
|
| Harry Stephen Keeler / Hazel Goodwin Keeler |
|
Quiribus Brown, a 7 1/2 foot tall man raised on a farm by a retired mathematician who taught him nothing but math, must solve four crimes using mathematics or be imprisoned on charges of perjury by his... (more) |
|
|
Casebook (2014) |
|
| Mona Simpson |
|
A novel written from the point of view of Miles Adler-Hart, a boy who is spying on his mother. He learns of his parents' divorce, his mother's sex life, and her lover's dark secret. Like the superheroes... (more) |
|
|
The Catalyst [The Strange Attractor] (1991) |
|
| Desmond Cory |
|
Mathematics professor John Dobie gets caught up in a truly mind-boggling
mystery when one of his former students, his wife's best friend, and then
his own wife wind up dead, and the police consider him to be a prime
suspect.
This is the first, my personal favorite, of the three "Professor Dobie
Mysteries" written by British author Desmond Cory. (See also "The Mask of Zeus" and " (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) |
|
|
Catching Genius (2007) |
|
| Kristy Kiernan |
|
A novel about a pair of sisters, one of whom is a "math genius". The title refers to the fact that she thinks "eyecue" is a disease when she first hears as a child that she has a high one and warns her... (more) |
|
|
A Certain Ambiguity: A Mathematical Novel (2007) |
|
| Gaurav Suri / Hartosh Singh Bal |
|
The intertwined stories of Ravi, a Stanford student taking a course on "Infinity" in the 1980's, and his grandfather who was jailed for blasphemy in New Jersey in 1919 constitute a philosophical investigation... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Chasing Vermeer (2004) |
|
| Blue Balliet |
|
A mystery novel for 6th graders. The first of a set of 3 separate “mystery” books in the “Hardy Boys / Nancy Drew“ genre. Two children, Calder and Petra, are neighbors and classmates... (more) |
|
|
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 Chimera Prophesies (2007) |
|
| Elliott Ostler |
|
A mathematician known only as ``#6'', while trying to come up with a model that would predict probabilities for different human behaviors, finds that in fact he can very nearly predict the future with... (more) |
|
|
The Chosen (1967) |
|
| Chaim Potok |
|
In Chaim Potok's classic novel about two Jewish teenagers growing up in New York City at the end of World War II, one of the two boys expresses an interest in symbolic logic:
'What kind of mathematics... (more) |
|
|
Christmas at Cardwell Ranch (2013) |
|
| B.J. Daniels |
|
In keeping with my expectations of a Harlequin Romance novel, Christmas at Cardwell Ranch does have an improbable love affair, between a modern-day cowboy and a female mathematician. However, this one... (more) |
|
|
The Cinderella Theorem (2014) |
|
| Kristee Ravan |
|
A very serious, mathematically inclined teenage girl is shocked to learn that her father is not dead as she had previously believed but rather is the ruler of an enchanted kingdom.
The no-nonsense,... (more) |
|
|
The Cipher (2015) |
|
| John C. Ford |
|
As he turns 18, the son of the billionaire who owns the patent on public-key encryption finds himself in several complicated situations. There is a love triangle involving both his long-time girlfriend... (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) |
|
|
The City of Devi (2013) |
|
| Manil Suri |
|
Manil Suri, the author of this erotic, dystopian, Indian adventure, is a professional mathematician. And so, it is not surprising that there is some mathematics in it. However, there really is not much... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Cliff Walk (1987) |
|
| Margaret Dickson |
|
This novel which alternates between being a melancholy character study and thriller, tells the story of a woman named Crelly, from her childhood in a family torn apart by abuse and tragedy, to the separation... (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) |
|
|
The Clueless Girl's Guide to Being a Genius (2011) |
|
| Janice Repka |
|
An excellent book for 4th — 5th graders but one I would recommend for all teachers and students. Written as an interlaced, first-person account of two young girls — Aphrodite, who is a math... (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 Code for Love and Heartbreak (2020) |
|
| Jillian Cantor |
|
In this young adult adaptation of Jane Austen's "Emma", a high school student unsuccessfully attempts to use her knowledge of mathematics to create a matchmaking app for her classmates. It is yet another... (more) |
|
|
Code to Zero (2000) |
|
| Ken Follett |
|
This thriller is set in 1958, with backdrop the first successful launching
of a US satellite. Several of the characters are mathematicians turned
rocket scientists. They frequently muse rather explicitly... (more) |
|
|
Coffee, Love and Matrix Algebra (2014) |
|
| Gary Ernest Davis |
|
This novel follows a year in the life of Jeffrey Albacete, a mathematics professor at a Rhode Island University, who is best known as the author of a textbook on matrix algebra.
Although I think it... (more) |
|
|
Coincidence (2013) |
|
| J.W. Ironmonger |
|
This book begins with the discovery of a three-year old girl named Azalea, alone at a seaside fairground and goes on to show us that her life is filled with surprising coincidences. When she grows up... (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) |
|
|
Colonel Lágrimas (2016) |
|
| Carlos Fonseca Suárez |
|
This novel is loosely based on the life of Alexander Grothendieck and is "creatively" constructed, like the writings of the Oulipo group or Borges. The Costa Rican/Puerto Rican author focuses much of his attention on Latin America and war, but mathematics itself and eccentricities (Grothendieck was eccentric!) also are major themes. The English version was translated by Megan McDowell.
(more) |
|
|
Com os Meus Olhos de Cão [With My Dog Eyes] (1986) |
|
| Hilda Hilst |
|
An aphasic Brazillian mathematics professor narrates his own decline into insanity.
Hilda Hilst was a Brazillian author whose works often addressed the topic of insanity (perhaps because both of her parents... (more) |
|
|
The Company of Strangers (2001) |
|
| Robert Wilson |
|
A bittersweet romance/thriller about a young woman mathematician in
Portugal spying for the British during World War II. There is a lot of
interesting stuff in this novel if you're looking at the romance... (more) |
|
|
Comrades in Miami (2005) |
|
| Jose Latour |
|
Colonel Victoria Valiente is an important figure in the Communist party of Cuba. However, her husband is a famous mathematician, Manuel Pardo. Manuel's job allows him to travel widely and he becomes... (more) |
|
|
Confusions of Young Torless (1906) |
|
| Robert Musil |
|
A semi-autobiographical novel set in a military
academy in a desolate corner of the Austro-Hungarian empire, is the
story of the intellectual awakening of an intelligent adolescent, and
contains several... (more) |
|
|
La Conjecture de Syracuse (2008) |
|
| Antoine Billot |
|
Although in reality the Collatz Conjecture remains unresolved, in Billot's novel the problem was famously solved by Etienne Thèseus, who figured out the solution while he fought for France in Algeria... (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) |
|
|
Continuums (2008) |
|
| Robert Carr |
|
The decisions we make and the difficulty in accepting the consequences is the main focus of this book about a Romanian mathematician who leaves her country and her daughter to be in a place that she could... (more) |
|
|
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 Countess Conspiracy (2013) |
|
| Courtney Milan |
|
This is a romance novel set in Victorian England in which the heroine is a biologist studying inheritance and the hero is her friend who publishes and presents her work in his name. The story begins... (more) |
|
|
Coyote Moon (2003) |
|
| John A. Miller |
|
Well, this book is hard to describe! It's certainly different and not easily categorizable. It is a novel that addresses the question "What if a young, nerdy, MIT mathematics professor died of cancer... (more) |
|
|
The Crimson Cipher (2010) |
|
| Susan Page Davis |
|
A code breaker seeks to solve the mystery of the murder of her father, a math professor who had been working on an encryption device at the beginning of World War I in this "Christian adventure/romance". (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) |
|
|
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003) |
|
| Mark Haddon |
|
The narrator of this novel is Christopher Boone, an autistic teenager who is trying to figure out who killed his neighbor's dog. Although Christopher is very good at math, he is not very good at understanding... (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Cypher Bureau (2018) |
|
| Eilidh McGinness |
|
This work of historical fiction tells the story of Marian Rejewski, a Polish mathematician who used algebraic methods to break the Nazi Enigma code before the beginning of World War II. Most of the book... (more) |
|
|
The Da Vinci Code (2003) |
|
| Dan Brown |
|
The last act of a dying curator at the Louvre is an attempt to pass on, in code, a secret that he did not want to take to the grave. Among the things needed to "decode" this secret message is a recognition... (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) |
|
|
The Dark Lord (2005) |
|
| Patricia Simpson |
|
This fantasy/horror/romance novel features as its protagonist a young, female math professor at UC-Berkeley who gets caught up in a battle with a demon when she finds an unusual deck of tarot cards in... (more) |
|
|
Dark Matter: The Private Life of Sir Isaac Newton (2002) |
|
| Philip Kerr |
|
A multiple-murder mystery which outlandishly casts Newton in the role of Sherlock Holmes during his tenure as Warden at the British Royal Mint (Watson is played Christopher Ellis, nephew of mathematician... (more) |
|
|
Dark of the Moon (1995) |
|
| John Dickson Carr |
|
The crime novel "Dark of the Moon" by John Dickson Carr has as one of its characters a female "mathematician", Camilla Bruce. (She is called a mathematician and is enthusiastic about the subject but... (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) |
|
|
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 of a Doxy (1966) |
|
| Rex Stout |
|
The murder victim's brother-in-law is a high school math
teacher. Nero Wolfe believes this to be relevant at one
point, even quoting some mathematical history from an
encyclopedia.
I... (more) |
|
|
Death of an Avid Reader: A Kate Shackleton Mystery (2017) |
|
| Frances Brody |
|
A strangled body is found in a supposedly haunted library in England in the 1920's. It turns out to belong to Dr. Potter, a math professor known for being a stylish dandy as well as for his intelligence.... (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) |
|
|
Deception (2003) |
|
| Eric Altman |
|
The differential geometer who has discovered a formula for the lifetime of tiny black holes is the only decent character in this book. That is not to say that the others are poorly written, just that... (more) |
|
|
Decoded (2002) |
|
| Mai Jia |
|
This novel tells the story of Rong Jinzhen, a mathematical genius who becomes a cryptographer in Mao's secret intelligence agency.
The author, who is a well-known award-winning author in China, supposedly... (more) |
|
|
Deep Lay the Dead (1942) |
|
| Frederick C. Davis |
|
This is a decent but familiar and unremarkable murder mystery, the kind in which an odd assortment of people are trapped together in a house, not knowing which of them is the killer. In this case, they... (more) |
|
|
The Deluge (2023) |
|
| Stephen Markley |
|
One character in this tome-sized political eco-thriller is Ashir al-Hasan. Ash, as he is called by friends, is a a government data analyst. Although he also appears to be "on the spectrum",
he is not... (more) |
|
|
The Devotion of Suspect X [Yôgisha X no kenshin] (2005) |
|
| Keigo Higashino |
|
Reclusive high school math teacher Tetsuya Ishigami is "devoted" to two things: his math research and his neighbor, Yasuko Hanaoka. When Hanaoka and her daughter kill her abusive ex-husband, they are... (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) |
|
|
Diary of a Bad Year (2007) |
|
| John Maxwell Coetzee |
|
J.M. Coetzee has a Nobel Prize in literature (2003) and an undergraduate degree in mathematics (University of Cape Town, 1961). It is therefore not too surprising to find him included in my list of mathematical... (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) |
|
|
Digital Fortress (1996) |
|
| Dan Brown |
|
In a final act of defiance, a young Japanese genius threatens to make
public his "unbreakable code" if the NSA does not confess that it has been
reading even encrypted e-mails. The heroine of the story... (more) |
|
|
Dirac (2006) |
|
| Dietmar Dath |
|
The protagonist tries to write a novel
about the mathematician and physicist Paul Dirac. Excerpts from
Dirac's works and Geoffrey A. Landis' novel "Ripples in the Dirac
Sea" are implemented in the plot, so you can learn a lot about
mathematics and quantum physics.
(As far as I know, this novel is currently only available in the original German. Please correct me if I'm wrong.) (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 Discovery of Heaven (1992) |
|
| Harry Mulisch |
|
This novel is considered to be the magnum opus of one of the
greats of Dutch postwar literature. (Original Dutch title _De Ontdekking van de Hemel_,
English translation 1996, film version in 2001)
_The... (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) |
|
|
The Distant Dead (2020) |
|
| Heather Young |
|
When a boy named Sal discovers the burned body of his middle school math teacher, two amateur sleuths try to determine who killed him. One of them is Jake, the volunteer fireman to whom Sal initially... (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) |
|
|
Divide Me By Zero (2019) |
|
| Lara Vapnyar |
|
Notes intended to be the outline for a math textbook by the narrator's mother instead give structure to her stories about her mother's death and her own love life.
Like the author, the character Katya... (more) |
|
|
The Divine Proportions of Luca Pacioli (2019) |
|
| W.A.W. Parker |
|
This novel is a biography of Fra Luca Pacioli in fictionalized form. Pacioli who lived from 1447 to 1517 was an Italian mathematician and Franciscan friar who authored one of the first printed mathematics... (more) |
|
|
Do the Math #2: The Writing on the Wall (2008) |
|
| Wendy Lichtman |
|
In this sequel to Do the Math: Secrets, Lies and Algebra, a middle school student who likes to think of things in terms of mathematical notation (for example, calling her friend Miranda "|m|" because she... (more) |
|
|
Do the Math: A Novel of the Inevitable (2008) |
|
| Philip Persinger |
|
A math graduate student becomes an intern for a math professor famous for his `theory of inevitability' but ends up also helping his wife (an even more famous author of romance novels) write a book using... (more) |
|
|
Do the Math: Secrets, Lies, and Algebra (2007) |
|
| Wendy Lichtman |
|
A math-loving eighth grader applies mathematical concepts to problems in her social life.
According to the book jacket, the author has a degree in mathematics and writes pieces for many periodicals.... (more) |
|
|
The Dobie Paradox (1993) |
|
| Desmond Cory |
|
Another Professor Dobie mystery (see also The
Catalyst and The Mask of Zeus) in which the so-called "Columbo with a chair in mathematics" solves the mystery of the murder of a young girl. There is less... (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) |
|
|
Double Digit (2014) |
|
| Annabel Monaghan |
|
This cleverly titled sequel to A Girl Named Digit follows the continuing adventures of a young "math whiz" whose talents make her both a weapon against and a target of terrorists. (more) |
|
|
A Doubter's Almanac (2016) |
|
| Ethan Canin |
|
This literary novel follows the life of the fictional mathematical genius Milo Andret from his youth in Michigan, though his education at Berkeley and the winning of a Fields Medal as a Princeton math... (more) |
|
|
Dr. No: A Novel (2022) |
|
| Percival Everett |
|
Wala Kitu is a professor of mathematics at Brown University who specializes in nothing. (It is not that he doesn't have a specialty. He is an expert in the very concept of nothingness.) His best friends... (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Duke with Benefits (Studies in Scandal) (2017) |
|
| Manda Collins |
|
A romance novel with a strong female lead, Lady Daphne Forsyth, who is a mathematician with some stereotypical anti-social traits. She has been set the task of solving an old mystery by breaking a cipher. However, since this is a romance novel, she is unsurprisingly distracted by a certain hunky guy, the "duke" of the title, whose family owns the library containing the cipher.
(more) |
|
|
D'Alembert's Principle: A Novel in Three Panels (2000) |
|
| Andrew Crumey |
|
A fictionalized presentation of the life (and love) of Jean le Rond
D'Alembert (1717-1783), best known -- to me at least -- as the first
to study and solve the famous linear wave equation u_xx + c u_tt = 0.
See the online
bookreview at at MAA Online. (more) |
|
|
Echoes from the Past (2006) |
|
| Edward Michel-Bird |
|
A young mathematics professor becomes involved in a mystery and a love affair when the identity of his true biological father is called into question. No mathematical ideas or results are discussed in... (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 Eight (1989) |
|
| Katherine Neville |
|
This book really is AMAZING. I have read it numerous times and it always gets better. Math plays an important part in this story and the connections made in the plot are fascinating. This book is an... (more) |
|
|
The Eighth Detective (2020) |
|
| Alex Pavesi |
|
Many years ago, math professor Grant McCallister published a paper mathematically analyzing the structure of murder mystery fiction. He even self-published a collection of short stories illustrating several... (more) |
|
|
The Einstein Enigma (2010) |
|
| José Rodrigues Dos Santos |
|
An adventure novel whose MacGuffin is a proof of the existence of God, formulated and hidden by Albert Einstein. There is more talk than action, which may disappoint some readers.
For those interested... (more) |
|
|
El matemático (1988) |
|
| Arturo Azuela |
|
It is a kind of bildungsroman narrated by a sexagenarian mathematician who makes a mathematical discovery in the verge of the year 2000. Of course, there is the detail of considering the year 2000 the... (more) |
|
|
Electric (2004) |
|
| Chad Taylor |
|
Three of the characters in this novel are mathematicians. Sam is a former statistician who now works at a successful Auckland data retrieval company. Because he is attracted to the hydrodynamic equations... (more) |
|
|
An Elegant Solution (2013) |
|
| Paul Robertson |
|
A fictionalized account of the life of Leonhard Euler, focusing on his relationship with the Bernoullis and told from the perspective of Christian theology. The novel also takes on aspects of a murder... (more) |
|
|
The Elusive Chauffeur (2008) |
|
| David H. Brown |
|
This mystery novel appears to have been conceived as a means for the author to "spread the word" about two things that are important to him: mathematics and his Christian faith. In it, a private detective... (more) |
|
|
The Embalmer's Book of Recipes (2009) |
|
| Ann Lingard |
|
An unusual and intimate novel that follows three women: a widowed sheep-farmer, a mathematician who studies quasicrystals, and a taxidermist (whose included blog entries explain the title of the book).... (more) |
|
|
Emmy Noether: The Mother of Modern Algebra (2008) |
|
| Margaret B.W. Tent |
|
A semi-fictional biography of Emmy Noether written for young adults.
The book has received positive reviews from many mathematicians who hope (as, one supposes, does the author) that young readers will... (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) |
|
|
En busca de Klingsor (In Search of Klingsor) (1999) |
|
| Jorge Volpi |
|
The story is highly mathematical, involving a German Character called Gustav
Links, though the main character is a young American physicist called Francis
Bacon (sounds good). The idea is that this... (more) |
|
|
Enchantress of Numbers: A Novel of Ada Lovelace (2017) |
|
| Jennifer Chiaverini |
|
This voluminous (448 page) work of historical fiction is told in first person from the perspective of Ada Byron King (Lady Lovelace) herself. Nevertheless, as the author can count on the reader to have... (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) |
|
|
Enigma (1995) |
|
| Robert Harris / Tom Stoppard |
|
In this this espionage story set in England's Bletchley Park at the height of the Second World War, Tom Jericho is a clever mathematician at the famous code breaking facility who -- either despite or because... (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Erasmus with Freckles [aka Dear Brigitte] (1963) |
|
| John Haase |
|
The novel Erasmus with Freckles (1963) about a college English professor who hates math and science whose son is a math prodigy, was adapted into the film Dear Brigitte (1965) and re-released as a novel... (more) |
|
|
The Escher Twist (2002) |
|
| Jane Langton |
|
Part of the author's Homer/Mary Kelly series of mysteries based in
Concord MA. The plot centers on a crystallographer falling in love
with a stranger at an exhibit of Escher work, and... (more) |
|
|
Eternal (2021) |
|
| Lisa Scottoline |
|
While living under the fascist regime of Mussolini in pre-war Rome, a Jewish prodigy attends university mathematics classes taught by Levi-Civita and forms one vertex of a "love triangle". The romance and the impact of anti-semitism on academia receive equal attention in this serious work of historical fiction from an author better known for light fare. (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Evil Genius (2005) |
|
| Catherine Jinks |
|
I am pleased to report that the titular "evil genius" in this children's novel is not the stereotypical cold mathematician in so many other works of mathematical fiction. In fact, the title character... (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 Expert (1999) |
|
| Lee Gruenfeld |
|
A techno-legal thriller centered on a trial over cryptographic
exportation. The chip in question uses properties of large Mersenne
primes to provide an unbreakable code. This explanation seems to... (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 Facts of Death (1998) |
|
| Raymond Benson |
|
Would you believe...James Bond battling a mathematical cult bent on world destruction? (It could happen.) In this latter day Bond novel, the villian is a dynamic leader of a cult who bases his teachings... (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 Fall of a Sparrow (1998) |
|
| Robert Hellenga |
|
In this novel, a literature professor travels to Italy to testify at the trial of the terrorists who murdered his daughter in a 1980 train bombing. The only math in it appears because another one of his... (more) |
|
|
The Fall of Man In Wilmslow (2009) |
|
| David Lagercrantz |
|
Before he gained fame in the US as the Swedish author taking over the mystery series featuring the fictional heroine Lisbeth Sander, David Lagercrantz wrote this novel about the death of mathematician... (more) |
|
|
False Witness (2007) |
|
| Randy D. Singer |
|
An espionage novel (with an embedded Christian religious message) about a mathematician's decryption algorithm with the potential to disrupt internet security.
(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 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 Fibonacci Confessions (2010) |
|
| Graham Wade |
|
A historical novel telling the life story of Leonardo Pisano, perhaps the most famous European mathematician of the Middle Ages, better known today as Fibonacci.
We know very little of the historical... (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) |
|
|
The First Circle (1968) |
|
| Alexandr Solzhenitsyn |
|
Solzhenitsyn had been a math major until Hitler and Stalin came up
with a different career path for him, and TFC is based on his own
brief stay in the luxury side of the Gulag, which he claims saved
his... (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) |
|
|
Flatterland: like Flatland, only more so (2001) |
|
| Ian Stewart |
|
In this "sequel" to Flatland, popular
mathematics writer Ian Stewart lets us accompany the granddaugther of the
original "A. Square" who starred in original classic, as she learns about
fractal dimensions,... (more) |
|
|
Flea Circus: A Brief Bestiary of Grief (2012) |
|
| Mandy Keifetz |
|
A mathematically inclined woman deals with her grief over the suicide of her lover, an entomologist who runs a flea circus, in this award winning novel.
Although the cover summary describes her as a... (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) |
|
|
Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria (2009) |
|
| Ki Longfellow |
|
Another novel about the historical figure Hypatia of Alexandria whose murder by Christian zealots as the Ancient Greek culture faded away makes her a good subject for authors with certain political and... (more) |
|
|
Flowers Stained with Moonlight (2005) |
|
| Catherine Shaw |
|
In this sequel to The Three-Body Problem, Vanessa Duncan is called upon to save an innocent young woman, falsely suspected of murdering her older and unlikable husband. Although there is no mathematics... (more) |
|
|
Forever Changes (2008) |
|
| Brendan Halpin |
|
A very somber novel written for young adults about a mathematically talented teenager with cystic fibrosis. Her math teacher helps comfort her by making an analogy between the important role of the infinitesimals in calculus and the importance of even a short life. (more) |
|
|
The Forever Marriage (2012) |
|
| Ann Bauer |
|
The unlikeable and unfaithful wife of a math professor only learns to appreciate the husband she never loved after his untimely death. The mathematician is humble but otherwise stereotypically brilliant (offered full professorships immediately upon receiving his PhD), unemotional and unromantic. (more) |
|
|
La formule de Stokes, roman (2016) |
|
| Michèle Audin |
|
The author, a professional mathematician as well as a member of the Oulipo literary group, wrote this unusual novel whose protagonist is not a person or animal but a formula. At least, that is what I... (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) |
|
|
A Foundation in Wisdom (2012) |
|
| Robert Loyd Watson |
|
A hitchhiker named Sheridan captivates the man kind enough to offer him a ride with fantastic tales of the Roman village of Ebon and the hero named Marcus who saved it from a giant dachshund named Dachy.
Both... (more) |
|
|
The Four Colors of Summer (2011) |
|
| Tefcros Michaelides |
|
Multi-generational love stories are interwoven with the history of the Four Color Theorem, including the controversies surrounding its computer-assisted proof.
This novel was published in Greek and... (more) |
|
|
The Four-Color Puzzle: Falling Off the Map (2013) |
|
| Lior Samson |
|
A math professor becomes intrigued with a high school student he meets at an online tutoring site when she presents him with what appears to be a short and very clever proof of the four-color theorem.... (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) |
|
|
The Fractal Murders (2001) |
|
| Mark Cohen |
|
In this award winning (Top Ten Mysteries on the Book Sense 76 Fall List for 2002) mystery novel "Hard-Boiled" Detective Pepper Keane is hired by a tall and attractive math professor (with whom he of course... (more) |
|
|
The French Mathematician (1998) |
|
| Tom Petsinis |
|
A fictionalized account (in first person) of the life and untimely
death of Evariste Galois, originator of the mathematical subject now
known as group theory.
This is a story about a mathematician,... (more) |
|
|
Freud's Megalomania: A Novel (2001) |
|
| Israel Rosenfield |
|
This is an intriguing piece of work, mixing fact
with fiction and different styles (from the scientific essay to
the diary), probably best understood as an ironic look upon the
"Freud wars".... (more) |
|
|
|
|
För immer in Honig (Forever in Honey) (2005) |
|
| Dietmar Dath |
|
Site visitor Hauke Reddmann writes from Germany to tell me about this experimental German novel which includes diagrams from category theory. (For those who might not know, category theory is an abstract... (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) |
|
|
Gambler's Rose (2000) |
|
| G.W. Hawkes |
|
A picaresque novel about the Halloran family who live by grifting. Charging lunch to their room in a hotel where they aren't staying and winning a fabulous yacht in a game of poker are the high points,... (more) |
|
|
Game Theory (2017) |
|
| Barry Jonsberg |
|
A high school student must save his younger sister from a kidnapper in this Australian YA novel.
Math is mentioned often in the book.
The book opens with a discussion of the equations on the special... (more) |
|
|
Gaming Instinct (Spieltrieb) (2004) |
|
| Juli Zeh |
|
[The math in this novel which was a best seller in Germany in 2004 is]
recognizable not only for experts, so it is mentioned in almost every
review. Zeh learned about game theory and the prisoner's... (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) |
|
|
Gauntlet (2009) |
|
| Richard Aaron |
|
Autistic mathematician, Hamilton Turbee, helps stop a terrorist plot.
The book has received praise for its portrayal of an autism and as a thriller. Of course, I like to see mathematicians portrayed... (more) |
|
|
A Gebra Named Al (1993) |
|
| Wendy Isdell |
|
In this story, Julie falls asleep on her algebra book after
spending a few frustrating minutes trying to finish her homework. An
imaginary number comes to visit her in her room, and transports her
to... (more) |
|
|
Geek Abroad (2008) |
|
| Piper Banks |
|
Miranda Bloom, the mathematical prodigy first introduced in Geek High returns in another novel for teenagers, this time emphasizing her participation in mathematical competitions. For instance, we see... (more) |
|
|
Geek High (2007) |
|
| Piper Banks |
|
Miranda Bloom is a mathematically talented girl trying to deal with normal teenage problems (family, boys, etc.) Although mental calculations have always come easy to Miranda, she does not appear to be... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Geometric Regional Novel (1969) |
|
| Gert Jonke |
|
An odd but charming book which describes a dreamy, strange, very static, grey world nestled in some corner of thought. In measured, clipped tones, the narrator describes the mathematically precise contours... (more) |
|
|
|
|
The Geometry of Sisters (2009) |
|
| Luanne Rice |
|
Young Beck hopes her mathematical skills will somehow bring back her dead father. Other reviewers have mostly complained that this novel does not work as the serious family drama it intends to be. From... (more) |
|
|
Getting Somewhere (1995) |
|
| Jenny Pausacker |
|
In this Australian novel for teenagers, a student who lives in the shadow of her twin is able to find her own identity and some self-respect with the help of a maths teacher. The teacher challenges her... (more) |
|
|
Ghost Dancer [a.k.a. Dance of Death] (2006) |
|
| John Case |
|
The blurb on the cover describes anti-hero Jack Wilson as a "brilliant mathematician" and also a "diabolical madman" in this thriller based on the popular conspiracy theory claiming that Nikola Tesla is... (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) |
|
|
Gifted: A Novel (2007) |
|
| Nikita Lalwani |
|
This novel tells the coming-of-age story of a girl whose Indian father is a professor of mathematics in Wales. She is talented at mathematics and even uses sophisticated math in her everyday life (e.g.... (more) |
|
|
The Girl in the Painting (2020) |
|
| Tea Cooper |
|
Jane Piper and Elizabeth Quinn are both interested in mathematics in this historical fiction novel which bounces back and forth between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Quinn arrives... (more) |
|
|
A Girl Named Digit (2012) |
|
| Annabel Monaghan |
|
A girl nicknamed "Digit" by her classmates because of her mathematical abilities and interests discovers a terrorist plot and begins working with the FBI to catch a double agent in this adventure aimed... (more) |
|
|
The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009) |
|
| Stieg Larsson |
|
In this sequel to the stunningly popular The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the self-taught, nearly autistic, young genius, Lisbeth Salander, once again becomes involved in a thrilling mystery allied with... (more) |
|
|
The Givenchy Code (2005) |
|
| Julie Kenner |
|
You've got to love the tag lines for this book: "A heel-breaking adventure in code-breaking that will bring out the math geek and the fashionista in you". "Cryptography is the new black".
A woman with... (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) |
|
|
|
|
God Doesn't Shoot Craps (2006) |
|
| Richard Armstrong |
|
Danny Pellegrino is a con artist who joins up with inventor/genius Virgil Kirk to market a mathematical get-rich-quick scheme which, amazingly, actually works.
The gambling scheme which Kirk calls... (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) |
|
|
|
|
Going Out (2002) |
|
| Scarlett Thomas |
|
A group of unusual friends go on a journey to Wales to meet with a healer who they hope can help each of them with their problems. The group consists of Luke (who is unable to go outside due to allergies... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Goldman's Theorem (2009) |
|
| R.J. Stern |
|
Hired by the little-known "University of Northern Vermont", Professor Goldman does not seem to be living up to his promise as a great math researcher. Under pressure from his superiors, he claims to have... (more) |
|
|
Good Benito (1994) |
|
| Alan P. Lightman |
|
This novel presents many instances in the life of mathematical physicist
Bennett Lang, the "Benito" of the title. The different scenes, presented
non-chronologically, cover most of his life from early... (more) |
|
|
Good Will (1989) |
|
| Jane Smiley |
|
A poor couple living on a rural farm deal with the intrusions of the "outside world", including an affluent and worldly African-American math professor and her young daughter.
I don't think there... (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) |
|
|
Gravity's Rainbow (1973) |
|
| Thomas Pynchon |
|
In this novel "there's "mathematicians'
graffiti" and a lot of musing on the Poisson-curve. See, for ex. page 140 in
the Pengiun 20th century classics edition.
I was impressed with Pynchon's... (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) |
|
|
Gulliver's Travels (1726) |
|
| Jonathan Swift |
|
If you are lucky enough to find an unabridged version of
Swift's classic book, you will be able to read (among descriptions of
the people of many other unbelievable countries) about the people of
Laputa.... (more) |
|
|
Gut Symmetries (1997) |
|
| Jeanette Winterson |
|
Two love affairs: one between a pair of physicists and the other between
the female physicist and her lovers wife. (The author presents this
analogy: A love triangle reduced to a line.)
It is often... (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) |
|
|
Hannah, Divided (2002) |
|
| Adele Griffin |
|
The story of a 13 year old girl living in rural Pennsylvania in 1934,
"Hannah" presents us with yet another fictional account of someone who is
not only talented in mathematics but also psychologically... (more) |
|
|
The Happy Numbers of Julius Miles (2013) |
|
| Jim Keeble |
|
The characters in this twisted tale include a transexual "Cupid" with a drug problem, a crooked businessman, a Somali babysitter, a four-year old boy of unknown paternity, a London police officer, the... (more) |
|
|
Hard Times (1853) |
|
| Charles Dickens |
|
A suggestion for a novel to be added to your website Mathematical Fiction:
In Charles Dickens's "Hard Times", poor schoolgirl Sissy Jupe is struggling in an educational system
that is obsessed... (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) |
|
|
The Helpline (2019) |
|
| Katherine Collette |
|
In this work of fiction, an anti-social character who believes that all of life's questions can be answered by mathematics discovers that there's more to life than numbers. In this particular version... (more) |
|
|
The Heroic Adventures of Hercules Amsterdam (2003) |
|
| Melissa Glenn Haber |
|
The plot focuses on a three inch tall boy who runs away from humans to live with mice, only to discover that the mice are regularly massacred by rats every seven years. The mice, however, cannot anticipate... (more) |
|
|
Het gemillimeterde hoofd (The Cropped Head) (1967) |
|
| Gerrit Krol |
|
It was published in 1967 by Querido, Amsterdam, and seems to
have been translated into Italian (La testa millimetrata). There is a
lot of mathematics in this experimental novel (Hans Freudenthal
judged:... (more) |
|
|
Hickory Dickory Shock! The Tale of Techies (2010) |
|
| Sundip Gorai |
|
This novel, which the author tells me is a best-seller in India, is a mystery thriller whose protagonist is a young man named "210". In the first chapter, which is available for free at the book's official... (more) |
|
|
A Higher Geometry (2006) |
|
| Sharelle Byars Moranville |
|
A teenage girl in the 1950's pursues her dream of becoming a mathematician in the American midwest over a background of sexism, romance and Cold War politics. This fictional account mirrors some of the... (more) |
|
|
Hinton (2020) |
|
| Mark Blacklock |
|
Charles Howard Hinton was a controversial mathematician working in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Howard Hinton, as he was known, studied and wrote about "the fourth dimension" and is best known... (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) |
|
|
Holy Disorders (1945) |
|
| Edmund Crispin |
|
Edmund
Crispin, pseudonym of Bruce Montgomery is generally considered the last of the British high literate mystery writers. He wrote a series of mysteries starring Gervase Fen, Oxford don, highly... (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 Hurricane (2016) |
|
| R.J. Prescott |
|
A British novel in which a shy math student, damaged by her past, begins an unlikely romance with a powerful boxer. "Hurricane" O'Connell is handsome, muscular, and dangerous, but also happens to be madly... (more) |
|
|
Hypatia: New Foes with an Old Face (1852) |
|
| Charles Kingsley |
|
A fictionalized account of the life and murder of the ancient Greek mathematician Hypatia. This
book, written in 1852 by Reverend Kingsley, focuses more on the
religious implications (especially the... (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 Married You for Happiness (2011) |
|
| Lily Tuck |
|
A bittersweet and beautiful work of literature in which an artist sitting beside the corpse of her recently deceased mathematician husband recalls snippets of their lives: how they met, conceiving and... (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 Idiot (2017) |
|
| Elif Batuman |
|
A farce about a Turkish-American Harvard freshman. As she is trying to figure out who she is and what academia is about, she meets an older math major with whom she develops both a romantic and intellectual... (more) |
|
|
Im Schatten des Regenbogens (1993) |
|
| Helga Königsdorf |
|
Desillusioned after
the fall of communism, several academicans are willlessly
"abgewickelt" (read: annexed and thrown onto the scrap heap)
by the Western "invaders".
Contains a few references to her old "Lemma 1", a mention
of the Mandelbrot set and a short discussion of the pattern
paradox (1,2,3,4,5,6 in lottery is as probable as any other
combination drawn).
(more) |
|
|
Imaginary Numbers (2020) |
|
| Seanan McGuire |
|
Sarah Zellaby, a running character in McGuire's InCryptid books, is featured prominently in this entry from the series. Sarah's species evolved from insects in another dimension but look essentially like... (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 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 Light of What We Know (2014) |
|
| Zia Haider Rahman |
|
The plot of this novel involves the financial industry around the time of the 2008 crash, Afghanistan after the American invasion, and the romance between a very clever man who grew up poor in Bangladesh... (more) |
|
|
In the Shadow of Gotham (2009) |
|
| Stefanie Pintoff |
|
The first victim in this murder mystery is a female math grad student at Columbia University in the year 1905. I'm sure many of the fans of this Edgar Award winning first-novel would mention the historical... (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 Incredible Umbrella (1979) |
|
| Marvin Kaye |
|
An English professor, one Mr. Phillimore, finds a magical umbrella which can whisk him away to fictional worlds. Deux ex Machina, and thence, a series of adventures follows, ending in Flatland.
The... (more) |
|
|
The Indian Clerk (2007) |
|
| David Leavitt |
|
Acclaimed author, Leavitt, presents a fictionalized version of one of the most famous "human interest stories" in mathematical history: the short life and career of Srinivasa Ramanujan. Focusing largely... (more) |
|
|
Infinite Jest (1996) |
|
| David Foster Wallace |
|
The twenty page passage on Eschaton, with the Mean
Value Theorem footnote, is possibly the best use of mathematics in fiction I've
ever seen.
this book has some of the most interesting and complete... (more) |
|
|
The Infinite Pieces of Us (2018) |
|
| Rebekah Crane |
|
Esther's family moves from California to New Mexico after she becomes pregnant while still in school. The main focus of this young adult novel is on her personal relationships (with the baby's father,... (more) |
|
|
Infinite Sum (2016) |
|
| Sheila Deeth |
|
Although trained as a mathematician and happily married, Sylvia has psychological issues that are interfering with her life. The main focus of this novel is on her interactions with her therapist in which... (more) |
|
|
The Infinite Tides (2012) |
|
| Christian Kiefer |
|
A somber novel about an astronaut whose daughter dies tragically and wife leaves him while he is in space. Since he and his daughter were both mathematical prodigies, for whom math was not only a beloved... (more) |
|
|
The Infinities (2010) |
|
| John Banville |
|
As mathematician Adam Godley lies seemingly unconscious and dying in bed, his family and professional rival wander through his home.
The title is a reference to the computational anomalies in quantum... (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Inquirendo Island (1886) |
|
| Hudor Genone |
|
A very long, thinly disguised satire on sectarian splits in Religion, fairly nicely written. A man lost at sea is ship-wrecked on an island called “Inquirendo Island”, probably a sarcastic... (more) |
|
|
|
|
An Instance of the Fingerpost (1999) |
|
| Iain Pears |
|
A murder mystery set in Oxford in the 1660's. Mathematician John
Wallis plays a major role as a character in the book (and Newton a
small role). See the review at MAA
online.
A very fine piece... (more) |
|
|
The Intangible (2022) |
|
| C.J. Washington |
|
Amanda is a data scientist who continues to show signs of pregnancy even after her miscarriage. Marissa is a math professor overwhelmed with guilt after a fatal accident. Their husbands are both non-mathematicians... (more) |
|
|
The Invention of Ana [Forestillinger om Ana Ivan] (2016) |
|
| Mikkel Rosengaard |
|
A Danish writer visiting New York becomes obsessed with the life story of Ana Ivan, a Romanian artist that he meets. She tells him about two lovers, about her parents' lives under the autocratic rule... (more) |
|
|
The Invention of Zero [Die Erfindung der Null] (2020) |
|
| Michael Wildenhain |
|
This German novel records a "game of cat and mouse" between a prosecutor and a suspected murderer, who happens to be a mathematician. The young prosecutor tries to prove that Martin Gödeler, who holds... (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) |
|
|
Invisible (2014) |
|
| James Patterson / David Ellis |
|
The (somewhat unlikeable) protagonist of this thriller is an FBI agent who loved numbers as a little girl and still prefers statistical analysis of data to time spent with other people. Combining this anti-social behavior with an obsessive desire to find a pattern among a huge number of unsolved murders leads her to begin her own investigation. (more) |
|
|
An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000) |
|
| Aimee Bender |
|
Mona Gray is a second grade math teacher for whom math is not only a
job, but a beloved friend, an obsession and a security blanket. In this first novel we
learn about the events that have shaped her... (more) |
|
|
Invisibly Breathing (2019) |
|
| Eileen Merriman |
|
Felix Catalan, a teenager whose autistic tendencies make him unpopular in school, becomes romantically involved with another student whose stutter similarly makes him an outcast.
Like many other anti-social... (more) |
|
|
Irrational Numbers (2008) |
|
| Robert Spiller |
|
Another mystery about high school math teacher Bonnie Pinkwater by the author of Witch of Agnesi. Like the others in this series, this is a murder mystery with adult themes (violence, homosexuality, etc.)... (more) |
|
|
The Ishango Bone (2012) |
|
| Paul Hastings Wilson |
|
Amiele becomes the first female student at Trinity College and goes on to disprove the Riemann Hypothesis at the age of 26, but is denied the Fields Medal. Written as if it were her life story recorded... (more) |
|
|
The Italian in Need of an Heir (2020) |
|
| Lynne Graham |
|
Maya is a beautiful British "maths whizz" who, if she had her way, would be working in an academic job doing research. She also is usually unwilling to put up with men who boss her around. But, her... (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) |
|
|
Jayden's Rescue (2002) |
|
| Vladimir Tumanov |
|
I am the author of a children's math mystery novel entitled Jayden's
Rescue and
Published by Scholastic Canada. This novel's plot revolves around
mathematical puzzles for the grades 4-6 level. The... (more) |
|
|
Journey into Geometries (1997) |
|
| Marta Sved |
|
It is styled after a frequently-used device: "Alice in X", where X can be any kind of space which you wish to explain to the gentle reader. In this instance, Alice, along with Lewis Carroll and a Doctor... (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) |
|
|
Kandelman's Krim: A Realistic Fantasy (1957) |
|
| John Lighton Synge |
|
Thanks for Tony Vance for pointing out to me that this novel by mathematical physicist J.L. Synge should be included in my database. It is difficult to find now, but it is clear that at the time of its... (more) |
|
|
Kapitoil (2010) |
|
| Teddy Wayne |
|
It is 1999 and Karim Issar is a Qatari programmer who has just moved to NYC to work on Wall Street. Karim understands the world through mathematics and equations, and wishes others did as well. He does... (more) |
|
|
Kavanagh (1849) |
|
| Henry Wadsworth Longfellow |
|
In the fourth chapter of this novel by the famous poet, the school teacher of the title tries to convince his skeptical wife that mathematics can be poetic by reading to her from Lilavati.
(This one chapter was published separately as Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, 3 (1855), pages 257—62, and so I will consider it both as a short story and as an excerpt from a novel.) (more) |
|
|
Kayip Piramit - Sayilarin Izinde (2019) |
|
| Ahmet Baki Yerli |
|
History of science professor Tahir Baturay has been trying for years to unravel the secrets of the Egyptian pyramids. However, despite all his attempts, he could not make any significant progress. On... (more) |
|
|
Kazohinia [A Voyage to Kazohinia] (1941) |
|
| Sándor Szathmári |
|
This novel features a Gulliver-like character (coincidentally named "Gulliver") who washes ashore in a strange land after a shipwreck. He first stays with the extremely logical Hins, who are always sensible... (more) |
|
|
Kepler: A Novel (1981) |
|
| John Banville |
|
Johannes Kepler, the most famous Rennaissance court mathematician,
is remembered today for his successes, especially his explicit
description of planetary orbits. However, he also had some rather
strange... (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 Kiss Quotient (2018) |
|
| Helen Hoang |
|
Stella is an woman with autistic tendencies who falls in love with the gigolo she hires to help her overcome her problems with intimacy. This romance novel, we are told, was inspired by the true life... (more) |
|
|
Küplerin Savasi (2021) |
|
| Ahmet Baki Yerli |
|
This Turkish novel for young adults appears to be a fictionalized account of the dispute between Tartaglia and Cardano over the solution to cubic equations. A nice account of the true story can be found here in Quanta Magazine, but I'm afraid I do not know anything more about Yerli's book which so far has only been published in Turkish. (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) |
|
|
Lady Claire is All That (2016) |
|
| Maya Rodale |
|
Claire Cavendish is a rare item in 19th century England, a woman whose primary interests lie within mathematics. Rather than making her an object of desire, however, her insistence on talking about maths... (more) |
|
|
The Lady's Code (2006) |
|
| Samantha Saxon |
|
The third in a series of romance novels about intelligent, confident women, The Lady's Code features Lady Juliet Pervell, who has ruined her reputation in social circles but earned an honorary degree in... (more) |
|
|
The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics (2019) |
|
| Olivia Waite |
|
Lucy Muchelny is responsible for the mathematical aspects of her father's famous publications in astronomy, but as this is the 19th century she receives no credit for that contribution. Desperate for... (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 Equation of Isaac Severy (2018) |
|
| Nova Jacobs |
|
After mathematician Isaac Severy's suspicious death, his grand-daughter follows the clues he left her to find and protect his final discovery.
In this murder mystery/family drama, Hazel Severy leaves... (more) |
|
|
The Last Page (2010) |
|
| Anthony Huso |
|
A fantasy novel set in a world where the magic known as "holomorphy" is achieved through mathematical formulas written in blood:
Caliph could still remember the banal demonstration Morgan had put on... (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) |
|
|
Le larmes de saint Laurent (Wonder) (2010) |
|
| Dominique Fortier |
|
The three separate stories that comprise this book are tied together by common themes of romance, death and volcanism. It is because of the second story, entitled "Harmony of the Spheres", that I am including... (more) |
|
|
Le théorème de Travolta (2002) |
|
| Olivier Courcelle |
|
The adventures of a young mathematician
trapped in the curious and delirious world of a
mathematical congress. A cross between
David Lodge and Groucho Marx.
I believe it has not been translated
into english (but should)
Very funny description of the mathematical world. Excellently written. Delirious.
(more) |
|
|
|
|
Leaning Towards Infinity (1996) |
|
| Sue Woolfe |
|
Tells the story of an Australian woman who wins a contest for the best
mathematical theory from an amateur mathematician. The prize is a trip to
a math conference in Athens. The theory proposed by... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Leeches (2011) |
|
| David Albahari |
|
Serb author David Albahari's avant-garde novel about a newspaper columnist caught up in a Kabbalistic plot is notable in that it is written as a single, unbroken paragraph. It is also sort of interesting,... (more) |
|
|
The Library Paradox (2006) |
|
| Catherine Shaw |
|
Vanessa Duncan returns as the skilled amateur detective of Victorian England in this third mystery novel by "Catherine Shaw". (See The Three-Body Problem and Flowers Stained with Moonlight for the earlier... (more) |
|
|
Life After Genius (2008) |
|
| M. Ann Jacoby |
|
Although his family would normally expect him to stay in their small town and take over the family business (a combination of a furniture store and funeral home), Mead Fegley's "genius" gives him the unprecedented... (more) |
|
|
Life and Fate (1959) |
|
| Vasily Grossman |
|
A Russian nuclear physicist flirts with the wife of his mathematician colleague and makes an important mathematical discovery, all during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
I had not heard of this... (more) |
|
|
Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,
The Gentleman (1759) |
|
| Laurence Sterne |
|
Michele Benzi wrote to recommend that I add this classic novel, which was critically praised when it first appeared and then fell in esteem due to accusations of plagiarism. Benzi writes:
I was surprised... (more) |
|
|
Life in a Mirror (2003) |
|
| Daniel Ryan |
|
This e-book not only contains many explicit references to mathematics, but it also claims to follow the outline of a mathematical text!
Set in 18th century Brittany, the story is ostensibly about royalty... (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) |
|
|
A Little Mathematician - Katie (2002) |
|
| Tadashi Miura |
|
A sweet little book by an author who wanted to be a math teacher and hopes he can "introduce the joy of learning mathematics to every student in this world through this story".
A little girl named Katie... (more) |
|
|
Little People (2002) |
|
| Tom Holt |
|
Tom Holt is generally considered one of the masters of
comic fantasy. His humour is apparently too British,
though, since he hasn't had an American publisher for
quite some time. The British-only... (more) |
|
|
Little Zero the Seafarer [Captain One's frigate] (1968) |
|
| Vladimir Levshin |
|
[This Russian children's novel] is about the titular character (who
appears in the other books [by Levshin]), sailing from the A bay through
arithmetical, algebraical and geometrical seas, learning... (more) |
|
|
A Logical Magician (1994) |
|
| Robert Weinberg |
|
A very creative romp through the lore of creatures of mythology and their return in modern times. A computer programmer creates a program to decode ancient texts and find the incantations to invoke powerful... (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) |
|
|
Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land (2005) |
|
| John Crowley |
|
This book is made up of notes and e-mail messages from a feminist historian interspersed with chapters from a previously unknown novel by Lord Byron which she has discovered while researching his daughter,... (more) |
|
|
|
|
The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2008) |
|
| Zachary Mason |
|
The introduction to this novel is a work of pseudo-scholarship, explaining how the chapters to follow were decoded by an NSA cryptographer with the help of the author. The intro contains references to... (more) |
|
|
Lost Empire (A Sam and Remi Fargo Adventure) (2011) |
|
| Clive Cussler / Grant Blackwood |
|
When archaeological adventuring couple Remi and Sam Fargo come across an old ship's bell off the coast of Zanzibar, they discover that someone else doesn't want them to find it. Eventually, their discovery... (more) |
|
|
Lost in Lexicon: An Adventure in Words and Numbers (2010) |
|
| Pendred Noyce |
|
This novel for middle school aged children seems at first rather similar to the Phantom Tollbooth, which was apparently a source of inspiration for its author. The plot is familiar: a boy and girl travel... (more) |
|
|
Lost in the Math Museum (2022) |
|
| Colin Adams |
|
Teenager Kallie, who doesn't particularly care for math, gets trapped in a math museum with her father and his friend Maria. They endure horrific dangers and meet the ghosts of famous mathematicians (as... (more) |
|
|
Lucy and David and the God Equation (2011) |
|
| Alan McKenzie |
|
Lucy, a freshman at a Scottish University, and David, the graduate student who leads the problem sessions for her physics class, discuss the mathematical and philosophical implications of Gödel's First... (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) |
|
|
Løvekvinnen [Lion Woman] (2006) |
|
| Erik Fosnes Hansen |
|
This Norwegian novel follows the life of a young girl who has a hairy face due to hypertrichosis.
According to Tom Louis Lindstrøm (who kindly brought this work of mathematical fiction to my attention)... (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) |
|
|
A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (2006) |
|
| Janna Levin
|
|
This novel about Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel contains much that has already been said many times before, and occasionally "tries too hard" artistically. Still I very much enjoyed reading it, and even... (more) |
|
|
The Madness of Crowds (2021) |
|
| Louise Penny |
|
In Penny's 17th murder mystery featuring detective Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of Sûreté du Québec, a statistician with a controversial political philosophy speaks at the local university, resulting... (more) |
|
|
Magic or Madness (2005) |
|
| Justine Larbalestier |
|
Fibonacci sequences and prime numbers have magical significance in the trilogy of young adult fantasy novels by Australian author Justine Larbalestier. Magic or Madness was the first book in the series, followed by Magic Lessons and Magic's Child.
(more) |
|
|
Magic Squares (1977) |
|
| Paul Calter |
|
A very unconventionally written mystery story full of well placed and well-integrated problems in mathematics, which makes this a great book to be included in a course on ‘mathematics in literature'.... (more) |
|
|
The Magic Two-Horn (1949) |
|
| Sergey Pavlovich Bobrov |
|
I barely know anything about this Russian children's book that takes place in a magical mathematical world. Maxim Arnold mentioned it to me at a conference in Oaxaca and told me only that many mathematicians cite it as a source of their interest in mathematics. If you know any more details, please write to let me know.
(more) |
|
|
Magpie Lane (2020) |
|
| Lucy Atkins |
|
This wonderful novel is difficult to describe, somewhere between literary fiction and a procedural mystery with the atmosphere of a supernatural thriller. The book is narrated by Dee, a nanny who is being... (more) |
|
|
Maid of Murder (2010) |
|
| Amanda Flower |
|
Like the author of this murder mystery, protagonist India Hayes is a librarian at a small midwestern college. Presumably unlike the author, Hayes must prove the innocence of her mathematician brother... (more) |
|
|
The Man of Forty Crowns (1768) |
|
| François Marie Arouet de Voltaire |
|
This classic, mordant commentary on the prevailing economic system in France in mid 18th century showcases a very long dialogue of 20+ pages between the narrator and a “geometrician”, taken to mean... (more) |
|
|
The Man Who Dammed the Yangtze: A Mathematical Novel (2011) |
|
| Alex Kuo |
|
A story of two number theorists at the opposite ends of the world having similar experiences of strife and disillusionment at times of great turmoil. Ge is a female mathematician teaching in schools in... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Mandelbrot the Magnificent (2017) |
|
| Liz Ziemska |
|
This novella is what I would call a "feel good fantasy" about the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot who coined the term fractal.
It takes the form of a memoir written by an elderly Mandelbrot recalling... (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) |
|
|
A Map for the Missing (2022) |
|
| Belinda Huijuan Tang |
|
Tang Yitian, a Chinese-American math professor who grew up in China shortly after the revolution, undertakes a journey to find his estranged father.
Anti-intellectualism always made it hard for Yitian... (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 Mask of Zeus (1992) |
|
| Desmond Cory |
|
Math is discussed a lot in this "Professor Dobie Mystery" novel because both the `detective' (Dobie) and the victim (his former Ph.D. student) are mathematicians. Of course, the math doesn't have much... (more) |
|
|
El matemático del Rey (2002) |
|
| Juan Carlos Arce |
|
It is a novel about a period in the lives of Juan Lezuza and his friend Luis Obelar during the first years of the rule of Phillip IV of Spain. Juan Lezuza is appointed teacher of the King, but it is... (more) |
|
|
Math Girls (2007) |
|
| Hiroshi Yuki |
|
Three high school friends work through some difficult mathematical ideas in this book, recently translated into English from the Japanese original.
The author is apparently well known in Japan for his... (more) |
|
|
Math is Murder (2012) |
|
| Robert C. Brigham / James B. Reed |
|
This is a murder mystery co-written by an emeritus math professor and a retired crime scene investigator. The victim was an egotistical and (almost unbelievably) unpleasant mathematics department chair... (more) |
|
|
The Math Olympian (2015) |
|
| Richard Hoshino |
|
A novel about a girl hoping to be on the Canadian team to the International Mathematical Olypmiad written by someone who should know what it is like. (FYI The author earned a silver medal as part of the... (more) |
|
|
Mathemagics (1996) |
|
| Margaret Ball |
|
This novel continues the adventures of characters developed in the
"chicks in chainmail" series of anthologies. As the title implies,
in these fantasy stories about a suburban mom who
lives the life... (more) |
|
|
Mathematical Goodbye (1999) |
|
| Hiroshi Mori |
|
Mori is a popular author of mystery novels in Japan and a former professor of engineering at Nagoya University. Li-Chang Hung, who has read the books translated into Chinese, has suggested that I add... (more) |
|
|
The Mathematician (1967) |
|
| Will Manson |
|
Despite the title, there is almost no math in this pulpy spy story. Its Cold War nationalism and sexism date it somewhat, but it is fine as light entertainment, with danger, romance, and a "twist ending".
The... (more) |
|
|
The Mathematician's Shiva (2014) |
|
| Stuart Rojstaczer |
|
When Rachela Karnokovich dies, her family's attempt to conduct the Jewish mourning ritual of sitting shiva is disturbed by the many strangers who descend on her Madison, WI home. Although she never won... (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) |
|
|
The Mathematics of Nina Gluckstein (1985) |
|
| Esther Vilar |
|
When Argentina's most famous singer dies in an accident during a concert, his unpopular wife, Nina Gluckstein, commits suicide. Yet, since public opinion of her was so low (and perhaps because she was... (more) |
|
|
Maths a mort (1990) |
|
| Margot Bruyère |
|
This murder mystery which takes place at the IHES in Paris was originally entitled "Dis-moi qui tu aimes (je te dirai
qui tu hais)". However, it has just been
be republished (Fall of 2002) with a change... (more) |
|
|
Measuring the World (2006) |
|
| Daniel Kehlmann |
|
Two famous Germans of the 19th Century, mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and explorer/geologist Alexander von Humboldt, are irreverently presented in this novel which topped the sales charts in Germany... (more) |
|
|
Mefisto: A Novel (1986) |
|
| John Banville |
|
Although the mathematics is only discussed in this novel in the vaguest terms, it is of the greatest importance to the book. Gabriel Swan, the main character/narrator is so focused on numbers and equations... (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) |
|
|
Men at Arms (1993) |
|
| Terry Pratchett |
|
The main plot is not math-related: the Night Watch has to solve a series of mysterious murders, all while dealing with the internal tensions due to the Patrician-mandated hiring of "ethnic minorities"... (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) |
|
|
Middlegame (2019) |
|
| Seanan McGuire |
|
When they were young, Roger (who lives in Cambridge MA and loves words) and Dodger (who lives in Palo Alto and loves math) had a psychic link that allowed them to see through each other's eyes, and to... (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) |
|
|
Midtown Pythagoras (2007) |
|
| Michael Brodsky |
|
Michael Brodsky is a deconstructionist's dream writer, which for most people,
simply means utterly unreadable. His many novels, stories, and plays inhabit a
world where meaning is just past the reader's... (more) |
|
|
The Mind-Body Problem (1983) |
|
| Rebecca Goldstein |
|
A philosophy graduate student seduces and marries a famous mathematician. They do not have a great marriage, but we are presented with some thought provoking passages concerning Princeton University,... (more) |
|
|
Miscalculations (2000) |
|
| Elizabeth Mansfield |
|
This romance novel features female "math whiz",
hired to help an attractive millionaire handle his wealth. Of course, they fall in love.
If you have read this book and can correct/add to the description above,
please write to me at kasmana@cofc.edu.
(more) |
|
|
The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl (2018) |
|
| Stacy McAnulty |
|
A girl who developed "genius level" mathematical abilities after being struck by lightning has a thing or two to learn about life in this novel for young adults.
Lucy Callahan finds that after her... (more) |
|
|
Miss Havilland (2020) |
|
| Gay Daly |
|
Evelyn Havilland, who left her studies in mathematics at Stanford University in 1917 to aid with the war effort, must decide between marrying a linguistics professor she met when they were both working... (more) |
|
|
Mister God, This is Anna (1985) |
|
| Fynn |
|
Though it is presented as if it were non-fiction, it is generally believed that this account concerning a very thoughtful six year old girl is a work of fiction. It is primarily about the girl's philosophy... (more) |
|
|
Moby Dick (1851) |
|
| Herman Melville |
|
I honestly had no idea that there was anything mathematical about this classic novel until Allan Goldberg suggested I look at Sara Hart's article on the subject in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.
Of... (more) |
|
|
Moment of Madness (2002) |
|
| Una-Mary Parker |
|
When her father, a brilliant but somewhat twisted mathematical statistician, dies unexpectedly, a woman is forced by his will to distribute valuable jewels to all of the women with whom he has cheated... (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Mouse and his Child (1967) |
|
| Russell Hoban |
|
Not really a kids book (too violent and depressing) nor an adult book
(about a toy mouse that goes on an adventure, with illustrations) this
is nonetheless an interesting allegory for those so inclined.... (more) |
|
|
Mr. Churchill's Secretary (2012) |
|
| Susan Elia MacNeal |
|
After graduating with a degree in mathematics from Wellesley, Maggie Hope plans to go on to graduate studies at MIT, but her plans change unexpectedly when a letter from England gets her instead looking... (more) |
|
|
Mrs. Einstein (1998) |
|
| Anna McGrail |
|
It's a wonderful novel that invents a history for Einstein's illegitimate daughter, about whom little is known. In the novel, she's a mathematician who becomes obsessed with her father's refusal to acknowledge... (more) |
|
|
Mulligan Stew (1979) |
|
| Gilbert Sorrentino |
|
An avant garde novel, or a parody of one, presented in the form of a collection of letters, notes, papers and other writings. Includes Cardano's formula, plus a full length parody of a mathematics research... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Murder and Mendelssohn (Phryne Fisher Mystery) (2014) |
|
| Kerry Greenwood |
|
As a fan of the Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries TV Series, I was pleased to see that the 20th novel in the series that inspired it features a mathematician, giving me an excuse to read it.
Phryne Fisher... (more) |
|
|
Murder at Queen's Landing (2021) |
|
| Andrea Penrose |
|
This is the fourth in a series of books in which romance sparks between Wrexford (a chemist) and Sloan (an artist) while they solve mysteries in Regency-era England. In this one, the mystery involves... (more) |
|
|
Murder at the Margin (1978) |
|
| Marshall Jevons |
|
This is the first of the Henry Spearman murder mysteries (the others
being THE FATAL EQUILIBRIUM and A DEADLY INDIFFERENCE--they can be read
in any order). These unusual murder mysteries star Harvard... (more) |
|
|
Murder by Mathematics (1948) |
|
| Hector Hawton |
|
The chair of the mathematics department at a British university and a shady bookseller are the victims in this "whodunnit"
published by Ward Lock & Co. (London and Melbourne) in 1948.
It was thanks... (more) |
|
|
Murder in the Great Church (2020) |
|
| Tefcros Michaelides |
|
Essentially all I know about this book is that it is a murder mystery which takes place in 6th century Constantinople and that the primary suspect is a young mathematician. Unfortunately, I do not read... (more) |
|
|
The Murdered Mathematician (1949) |
|
| Harry Stephen Keeler |
|
This book is probably the least believable thing I've ever read, but lots of fun!
Quiribus Brown is a 7 1/2 foot tall man who was raised by his father on a farm in Indiana. His father was a math professor... (more) |
|
|
Murmur (2019) |
|
| Will Eaves |
|
A novel about a character whose story is clearly closely modeled on the life of Alan Turing. Like Turing, Alec Pryor is a British mathematician whose worldview is shaped by a childhood romance with a... (more) |
|
|
The Music of the Spheres (2001) |
|
| Elizabeth Redfern |
|
A highly praised (a la Caleb Carr) historical thriller set in Europe in
1795, involving lots of astronomy. This includes Laplace musing over his
theorem that gravitational perturbations are bounded, and his wondering
if a similar theorem applies to history.
(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) |
|
|
The Mystery of Khufu's Tomb (1935) |
|
| Talbot Mundy |
|
A rapid-read, reasonably entertaining novel about the real location of the Pharaoh Khufu's (Cheops) tomb and the fabulous treasury buried therein. An old, Chinese mathematician spends decades decoding... (more) |
|
|
The Mystic Cipher (2009) |
|
| Dennis Mangrum |
|
When an ex-Army Ranger finds a mysterious coded document on his farm purporting to be the key to the location of a hidden treasure, he enlists the aid of his daughter, a math student. There is stereotypical... (more) |
|
|
Nagel im Himmel (2020) |
|
| Patrick Hofmann |
|
The protagonist in this novel grows up in a loveless, dysfunctional family, but finds refuge and success in mathematics until he is "saved" by a physicist.
Since I do not read German, my knowledge of... (more) |
|
|
Naked Came the Post-modernist (2013) |
|
| Sarah Lawrence College Writing Class WRIT-3303-R / Melvin Jules Bukiet |
|
Written as a group project by the students in a creative writing class at Sarah Lawrence College, this wacky academic farce takes the form of a whodunit, trying to identify the murderer of a math professor. (more) |
|
|
The Name of the Rose (1980) |
|
| Umberto Eco |
|
A mystery novel which takes place in a 14th Century monastery by the brilliant Italian author, Umberto Eco. This book only has a small amount of math in it, but I frequently receive recommendations to... (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Nearly Gone (2015) |
|
| Elle Cosimano |
|
Nearly Boswell has (obviously) a really cool name. She also has a strong interest in her science and math classes. And, for some reason, she also has the ability to taste emotions when she touches other... (more) |
|
|
Necroscope (Series) (1992) |
|
| Brian Lumley |
|
Harry Keogh is a "necroscope" who can communicate with the dead. So, when omens suggest that the Möbius strip and space-time are going to be relevant to his plans in the near future, he goes straight... (more) |
|
|
The Nesting Dolls (2020) |
|
| Alina Adams |
|
A novel in three-parts focusing on three women in the same family over the course of a century. It is the middle story, concerning Natasha Crystal, that is most strongly connected to mathematics. Natasha... (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) |
|
|
New Tales of the
The Absent-Minded Master (1971) |
|
| Vladimir Levshin |
|
This is the third in the Master of the Absent-Minded Sciences trilogy.
The third book is about the two investigating the stealing of a very
valuable stamp. It ends with the promise of further adventures, but
the author never wrote them.
Levshin's beloved children's books have never been translated into English, but can be read in Russian at lib.rus.ec. (more) |
|
|
Night and Day (1919) |
|
| Virginia Woolf |
|
The protagonist, Katherine Hilbery,
is a young woman who (like the author) grows up in a "literary"
family; her "job" is to help her mother both in writing a biography of
her grandfather, a famous... (more) |
|
|
Night of the Eerie Equations (2015) |
|
| Robert Black |
|
Another sequel to Night of the Paranormal Patterns about teenager Lennie Miller who solves middle-school mathematical problems for vampires, wizards, and other monsters. This time, she not only has to... (more) |
|
|
Night of the Frightening Fractions (2015) |
|
| Robert Black |
|
In this sequel to Night of the Paranormal Patterns, teenager Lennie Miller continues to solve mathematical problems to save her town from ghosts and zombies.
I haven't read this young adult novel. I hope to get a chance to do so someday and will post more information here if I do. Or, if you have read it, please write to let me know what you thought of it, and I'll post your review here!
(more) |
|
|
Night of the Paranormal Patterns (2014) |
|
| Robert Black |
|
A young adult novel that uses the fantasy adventure genre to introduce pre-algebra concepts. The protagonist, a seventh grader named Lennie, has been chosen as the "pattern finder" for werewolves, vampires... (more) |
|
|
Nightscape: The Dreams of Devils (2012) |
|
| David W. Edwards |
|
A teenage math prodigy is contacted by other-worldly beings through his nightmares. As the separation between dream and reality seems to disappear, he faces a supernatural threat with the help of a religious... (more) |
|
|
The Nine Tailors (1934) |
|
| Dorothy Leigh Sayers |
|
This Lord Peter Wimsey novel is often considered Sayers' best. The plot revolves around the art of change ringing, often called "campanology" by non-campanologists. As usual with Sayers, she makes... (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 One You Know (2008) |
|
| Michelle Richmond |
|
Having felt overshadowed by her mathematician older sister when she was alive, the main character becomes obsessed with her murder after the sister is killed. Using her sister's notebook describing her... (more) |
|
|
No Regrets (2007) |
|
| Shannon Butcher |
|
This is an espionage thriller in which a cryptographer reluctantly helps the military break a mathematical code. It gets high ratings from those who enjoy this sort of cloak-and-dagger stuff. Moreover,... (more) |
|
|
|
|
Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less (1976) |
|
| Jeffrey Archer |
|
A mathematics professor who lectures at Oxford on group theory is among four clever people who plot to get revenge on the con artist who duped them in this, the first novel by politician and now best-selling... (more) |
|
|
Notes from the Underground (1864) |
|
| Fyodor Dostoevsky |
|
Part I
involves an unnamed rather crazed and unreliable narrator
(generally known as "the Underground Man") raving and rambling
against life, the universe, and everything. A few... (more) |
|
|
Nothing but the Truth (and a few white lies) (2006) |
|
| Justina Chen Headley |
|
This is a novel for young adults about a half Asian teenager who is sent to a summer Math Camp at Stanford by her overprotective mother. She enjoys the camp more than she expected to, until her mother... (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) |
|
|
Number 9: The Search for the Sigma Code (1998) |
|
| Cecil Balmond |
|
A young boy learns about mathematics while trying to solve a mathematical puzzle.
"As a teacher and Education Inspector in England I would rate
this book very highly. It is extremely well written... (more) |
|
|
The Number Devil [Der Zahlenteufel] (1997) |
|
| Hans Magnus Enzensberger |
|
"The title may be translated as The
Counting Devil, or maybe The Number Devil, and it has a subtitle that
translates to 'a pillowbook for everyone
who is afraid of math'. Enzensberger is a respected... (more) |
|
|
The Number of Love (The Codebreakers) (2019) |
|
| Roseanna M. White |
|
This novel may fall into an unlikely combination of categories (it is a wartime religious historical romance spy story that is also mathematical), but its main character is a familiar stereotype: Margot... (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) |
|
|
Numberland (1987) |
|
| George Weinberg |
|
The co-author (with John Schumaker) of STATISTICS: AN
INTUITIVE APPROACH, and practicing psychotherapist, tells
a charming little fable about Numberland.
Peace, harmony,... (more) |
|
|
Numbers (2009) |
|
| Dana Dane |
|
Hip Hop artist Dana Dane wrote this novel about a NYC youth with mathematical talent who gets caught up in a life of crime. There is no actual mathematics discussed. Rather, it appears in a few brief comments only to justify the protagonist's nickname of "Numbers" and presumably to convince us that he had the potential for a bright future under the right circumstances.
(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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
|
|
The Odd Women (1893) |
|
| George Gissing |
|
This is one of many Victorian novels about romance, gender and class, but it has aged well. Among the several relationships it considers is one between a mathematician, the author of "A Treatise on Trilinear... (more) |
|
|
Odds Against Tomorrow (2013) |
|
| Nathaniel Rich |
|
Mitchell Zukor is a statistician and probabilist whose area of expertise is the prediction of disasters. To many people, including the reporter/narrator, this makes him a humorous and pathetic number... (more) |
|
|
Odile (1937) |
|
| Raymond Queneau |
|
A humorous semi-autobiographical novel by this famous, French, surrealistic author.
Queneau seems to have had some training as a mathematician and was friends
with several leading French mathematicians.... (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) |
|
|
Once Upon a Wardrobe (2021) |
|
| Patti Callahan |
|
Megs is a student at Oxford University in 1950 whose eight year old brother is so ill that he is unlikely to live another year. While Megs loves equations, her brother George loves the new book "The Lion,... (more) |
|
|
One Hundred Twenty-One Days (2014) |
|
| Michèle Audin (Author) / Christiana Hills (Translator) |
|
This tragic "novel" by mathematician and Oulipo member Michèle Audin follows the lives of three fictional mathematicians (Christian Mortsauf, Robert Gorenstein and Andre Silberberg) through the first... (more) |
|
|
The One Plus One (2014) |
|
| Jojo Moyes |
|
The title presumably primarily refers to the couple in the romance: Jess (a single mom struggling to make ends meet by working as a cleaning woman) and Ed (a well-off client of hers, facing charges for... (more) |
|
|
One Word Kill (2019) |
|
| 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) |
|
|
|
|
Only Say the Word (2005) |
|
| Niall Williams |
|
This novel about loss and grief includes a minor character (the protagonist's brother) who has mathematical talent and "retreats" into numbers. He believes that "for every problem there is a true and perfect solution" and eventually applies his skills to gambling (apparently providing the perfect solution to the problems of his life.) (more) |
|
|
Operation Chaos / Operation Changeling (1969) |
|
| Poul Anderson |
|
Part of a series of stories about detectives who use magic and religion published in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine in the 1960s, Operation Changeling (later published in novelized form in Operation... (more) |
|
|
Orpheus Lost: A Novel (2007) |
|
| Janette Turner Hospital |
|
This book is simultaneously a beautiful love story with frequent allusions to the myth of Orpheus, a political thriller, and a gut wrenching tear jerker about people whose lives are destroyed by war. ... (more) |
|
|
Ossian's Ride (1959) |
|
| 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) |
|
|
Out of the Sun: A Novel (1996) |
|
| Robert Goddard |
|
Harry Barnett (first introduced in the novel Into the
Blue) investigates the circumstances that lead to
his son's accident. The son, 33 year old math genius, lies in a coma
and the accident is somehow... (more) |
|
|
The Outside (2019) |
|
| Ada Hoffman |
|
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) |
|
|
The Oxford Murders (2004) |
|
| Guillermo Martinez |
|
A young, Argentinian mathematician visiting the UK is drawn into a murder mystery when his landlord (a woman who had worked as a code breaker during World War II) is killed. A clue and the words "The... (more) |
|
|
Panda Ray (1996) |
|
| Michael Kandel |
|
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) |
|
|
The Papers of A.J. Wentworth, B.A. (1949) |
|
| Humphry Francis Ellis |
|
This is a humorous book about A J Wentworth, school master at a British school, who teaches Algebra to 11-13 year old children. The entire novel has a touch of Wodehouse to it as it follows the bumbling... (more) |
|
|
Parade's End (1924) |
|
| Ford Madox Ford |
|
Although the British aristocracy, women's liberation, marital infidelity, and World War I are more important to this acclaimed novel, math arises a few times since the primary protagonist, Tietjens, is... (more) |
|
|
Paradox (2000) |
|
| John Meaney |
|
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) |
|
|
The Parrot's Theorem (2000) |
|
| Denis Guedj |
|
This is an ambitious novel, a magical fantasy about a talking parrot bought at a flea market in France who, with the help of the personal library of a reclusive mathematical genius, teaches some children... (more) |
|
|
Les Particules élémentaires [Elementary Particles] (1998) |
|
| Michel Houellebecq |
|
The following description is based on material sent to me by Annie-Michel Pajus (IREM PARIS 7) in French. Any error below is likely to be a mistake that I made in attempting to translate it.
This novel... (more) |
|
|
Pascal's Wager (2001) |
|
| Nancy Rue |
|
A math graduate student working in K-theory meets a young philosophy professor who challenges her atheistic beliefs with Blaise Pascal's famous "wager". Mathematics takes a back seat to theology in this... (more) |
|
|
The Peculiarities (2021) |
|
| David Liss |
|
Thomas Thresher, the youngest descendant of the founder of Thresher's Bank in London, has problems. For one thing, Walter Thresher, the current bank director, has trapped him in a dead-end job as a bank... (more) |
|
|
Perelman’s Refusal [Les Refus de Grigori Perelman]
(2017) |
|
| Philippe Zaouati |
|
I was quite concerned when I first heard that the American Mathematical Society was publishing this "novel"
that promised "to immerse [the reader] in the tormented mind" of Grigori Perelman. I became... (more) |
|
|
A Perfect Equation (The Secret Scientists of London) (2022) |
|
| Elizabeth Everett |
|
Miss Letitia Fenley wishes to compete for the prestigious Rosewood Prize for Mathematics. Unfortunately, she is distracted from her research by her role in a secret society of female scientists in Victorian... (more) |
|
|
The Perfect Spiral (2001) |
|
| 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) |
|
|
Permafrost (2019) |
|
| Alastair Reynolds |
|
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) |
|
|
Perry Rhodan 2638: Zielpunkt Morpheus-System (2012) |
|
| Marc A. Herren |
|
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) |
|
|
A Person of Interest (2008) |
|
| Susan Choi |
|
Professor Lee, an older math professor at a small mid-western university becomes a suspect when a package bomb kills the young and popular professor in the office next to his. More of a serious psychological... (more) |
|
|
Petersburg (1913) |
|
| Andrei Bely |
|
In this modernist Russian novel, the revolutionary Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov is charged with the task of killing a Tsarist official ... his own father. In addition to mathematical terminology that... (more) |
|
|
Phantom (2006) |
|
| Terry Goodkind |
|
Richard Rahl, the protagonist of the best-selling Sword of Truth series, seeks to protect the world from an evil spell which (among other things) has removed his wife from existence.
As Kati Voigt points... (more) |
|
|
The Phantom Tollbooth (1961) |
|
| Norton Juster / Jules Feiffer (Illustrator) |
|
This "Alice in Wonderland"-esque children's book follows our hero,
Milo, to the fantasy world through his toy tollbooth. One of the
lands he visits is very "mathematical". We meet the dodecahedron,... (more) |
|
|
Pi mal Daumen (2024) |
|
| Alina Bronsky |
|
In this novel, a nerdy prodigy befriends an older math "noob". Since it has so far only been published in German, a language I cannot read, I do not know much about it. But, Hauke Reddmann who brought... (more) |
|
|
A Piece of Justice (1995) |
|
| Jill Paton Walsh |
|
The mathematics of tilings and quilting play background roles in this mystery in which a graduate student attempts to write a biography of the (fictitious) mathematician Gideon Summerfield. Summerfield... (more) |
|
|
|
|
The Poison Master (2003) |
|
| Liz Williams |
|
This is one of those fantasy novels in which mathematics and magic are intertwined. As usual, it is nice to see mathematics portrayed as being simultaneously powerful and beautiful...but there isn't much... (more) |
|
|
PopCo (2004) |
|
| Scarlett Thomas |
|
Alice was raised by her grandparents, a mathematician and a cryptographer, and now uses what she learned from them to make mathematical puzzles for children. Her employer, the giant toy company "PopCo",... (more) |
|
|
Powerball 310 (2007) |
|
| K.T. Reid |
|
The premise of this amusing crime caper is a gang of experts who pull of a successful theft of a $310 million Powerball lottery jackpot by generating a winning ticket just after the numbers have been... (more) |
|
|
Practical Applications of Game Theory (2013) |
|
| Andrew Thomas Breslin |
|
A picaresque novel about a "rogue mathematician" who uses concepts from game theory to survive in a maximum security prison.
Although the situation is a realization of the Prisoner's Dilemma, it is well-written and does not come across as didactic or forced.
Originally serialized in the online literary magazine Imaginaire in 2013, it is now also available as a self-published e-book. (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Prince of Mathematics: Carl Friedrich Gauss (2006) |
|
| Margaret B.W. Tent |
|
A fictionalized account of the life and achievements of one of history's greatest mathematicians, told in a style which is appropriate for children but also maintains the interest of adult readers.
(I'm... (more) |
|
|
The Princess Hoppy or the Tale of Labrador (1993) |
|
| Jacques Roubaud |
|
French mathematician Jacques Roubaud, member of the Oulipo group, wrote this bizarre, postmodern, fairy tale which is decidedly for adults rather than for children. According to the cover,
The tale... (more) |
|
|
Principles of Emotion (2024) |
|
| Sara Read |
|
Meg Brightwood grew up as a mathematical prodigy with an overbearing mathematician father and an absent mother. She later quit her academic job due to a combination of her crippling anxiety and the sexism... (more) |
|
|
Probabilities (1995) |
|
| Michael Stein |
|
Sixteen year old Will Sterling is the protagonist of this "coming of age story" that throws just a little math in with the usual teen-angst and sexual exploration.
The author is very good at letting you... (more) |
|
|
Professor Conundrum Mysteries! (2008) |
|
| Bill Streifer |
|
My book, Professor Conundrum Mysteries!...combines math education (non-fiction) and historical fiction.
The book consists of five stories that take place during important events in 20th century U.S.... (more) |
|
|
The Proof of Love (2011) |
|
| Catherine Hall |
|
A Cambridge maths grad student takes a holiday in England's remote and rural Lake District, hoping to be able to make progress on his research but instead learning more about his own humanity. A major... (more) |
|
|
Properties of Light (2000) |
|
| Rebecca Goldstein |
|
This is a beautifully written novel about a theoretical physicist who
hates the daughter of a more senior physicist whose work he
admires. The real plot of the novel revolves around why he hates her,... (more) |
|
|
Psychohistorical Crisis (2001) |
|
| Donald Kingsbury |
|
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) |
|
|
|
|
Pyramids (2001) |
|
| 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) |
|
|
Pythagoras Eagle & the Music of the Spheres (2003) |
|
| Anne Carse Nolting |
|
A very well-written, highly mathematical novel for 5th — 6th graders. Three children — Shawna, Adin and Tavia — are math aficionados and are trying to crack the Beale Ciphers, a set... (more) |
|
|
Pythagoras the Mathemagician (2010) |
|
| Karim El Koussa |
|
This novel concerns the ancient Greek mathematician to whom we generally attribute the theorem relating the lengths of the sides of a right triangle. However, it focuses much more on his religious, mystical,... (more) |
|
|
Pythagoras' Revenge: A Mathematical Mystery (2009) |
|
| Arturo Sangalli |
|
Freelance science journalist Sangalli has written a book which presents some historical information about Pythagoras and his beliefs in the form of a novel of the detail driven conspiracy theory adventure... (more) |
|
|
Pythagorean Crimes (2006) |
|
| Tefcros Michaelides |
|
This murder mystery takes place amid the exciting developments occurring in the mathematical and artistic communities in Europe between 1900 and 1931. Much of what one will learn by reading this book... (more) |
|
|
The Quantum Weirdness of the Almost-Kiss (2021) |
|
| Amy Noelle Parks |
|
In this young adult romance, Evie Beckham is an extremely anxious teenager who loves math and attends a STEM magnet school. She is starting to get interested in dating, but is unaware that her longtime... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Quicksilver: The Baroque Cycle Volume 1 (2003) |
|
| Neal Stephenson |
|
This long novel from the author of Cryptonomicon does for 17th Century mathematics what that earlier novel did for the 20th century. Namely, it deifies some great historical mathematicians (this time... (more) |
|
|
The Rabbit Factor [Jäniskerroin] (2020) |
|
| Antti Tuomainen |
|
After his anti-social tendencies get him fired from his job as an actuary, the mathematically obsessed Henri inherits his deceased brother's adventure park, along with his tremendous debt to a dangerous... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Randall and the River of Time (1950) |
|
| Cecil Scott Forester |
|
Charles Randall meets two people who change his life while he is on leave from fighting in World War I: a patent lawyer for whom he designs an improved flare and the seductive wife of a fellow soldier.... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Der Rechenmeister [aka The Mathematician] (1999) |
|
| Dieter Jörgensen |
|
When I browsed through your list I found one book missing that I have in my library: "Der Rechenmeister" by Dieter Jörgensen is a novel describing the life of Niccolo Tartaglia in Venice and his battle... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Regarding Roderer (1994) |
|
| Guillermo Martinez |
|
A short novel about Gustavo Roderer, a brilliant but troubled young man in Argentina. Mathematics is not a central theme, but arises as Roderer's friend (the narrator) talks with him about the philosophical... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
La Resta [The Remainder] (2015) |
|
| Alia Trabucco Zerán |
|
Two friends from modern day Santiago travel through Chile using "mortuary mathematics" to attempt to better understand the legacy of their country's dictatorship:
[A]nd just as I'm calming down and... (more) |
|
|
Return from the Stars (1961) |
|
| 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) |
|
|
The Return of Moriarty (1974) |
|
| John Gardner |
|
The British spy thriller novelist, perhaps now best known
for his 007 novels, wrote three novels starring Professor
Moriarty, THE RETURN OF MORIARTY (UK title MORIARTY),
THE REVENGE OF MORIARTY... (more) |
|
|
Rincorse (1994) |
|
| Dario Voltolini |
|
The title means "Run-ups" in Italian. The book tells the story
of a young, talented mathematician who travels trough Italy
interviewing for jobs at various companies. During one of the
interviews... (more) |
|
|
The Rithmatist (2013) |
|
| Brandon Sanderson |
|
Geometric chalk drawings have magical power in this Harry Potter-like book for teens. In fact, it takes place in an "alternate universe" where Earth's history is different. Since "Rithmatics" was discovered... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
|
|
The Romanian Gambit: A Statistical Spy Novel (2020) |
|
| Elliott Ostler |
|
This espionage novel attempts to teach the reader about statistical analysis.
Alex:
The Romanian Gambit, A Statistical Spy Novel (2020) by Elliott Ostler, is now available on Amazon, and IMHO belongs... (more) |
|
|
Rooster: An American Tragedy (2000) |
|
| Brian Fielding |
|
A gifted artist suffering from leprosy encounters Tamara Browne, a quirky
former math grad student who is interested in "humanistic mathematics".
"While this book is not based on mathematics, it... (more) |
|
|
Roten av minus én [The Square Root of Minus One] (2006) |
|
| Atle Næss |
|
There are three different levels of reality in this novel: On the one hand it is the story of Terje Huuse, a Norwegian mathematician undergoing a midlife crisis. That part of the story is presented through... (more) |
|
|
Rough Strife (1980) |
|
| Lynne Sharon Schwartz |
|
This is the story of the courtship, marriage and affairs of Ivan (who works on the business side of the art world) and Caroline (a math professor).
Although there are plenty of clues to the knowledgeable... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
Royal Highness (Königliche Hoheit) (1909) |
|
| Thomas Mann |
|
At the heart of Thomas Mann's novel, “Royal Highness,” is the courtship and eventual marriage of Klaus Heinrich, the heir to a fictional German principality, and Imma Spoelmann, the daughter... (more) |
|
|
Rubicon Beach (1986) |
|
| Steve Erickson |
|
One of the three plot lines in this bizarre novel follows a mathematician who has made a (supposedly) horrific discovery.
Since there are no direct connections between the other two characters and the... (more) |
|
|
The Rule of Four (2004) |
|
| Ian Caldwell / Dustin Thomason |
|
There is an enigmatic book from the late 15th century called Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, written by an Italian monk, Francesco Colonna (available at gutenberg.org for download). The book chronicles the... (more) |
|
|
The Sabre Squadron (1966) |
|
| Simon Raven |
|
Daniel Mond, a British PhD candidate in mathematics, finds himself in mortal danger after traveling to Göttingen in the 1950s to analyze papers by the deceased German mathematician Dortmund.
I had... (more) |
|
|
Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz (1997) |
|
| Irene Dische |
|
Like many other mathematicians in fiction (and in real life too?), the protagonist in this novel is brilliant when it comes to calculations but has difficulty with the most commonplace examples of human... (more) |
|
|
|
|
The Sand-Reckoner (2000) |
|
| Gillian Bradshaw |
|
In this historical novel whose title is copied from one Archimedes' own works, the famous Greek mathematician is your typical math nerd, always
so wrapped up in his computations that he is barely aware... (more) |
|
|
Saraswati's Way (1978) |
|
| Monika Schroder |
|
This is a novel written for very young adults (age 10 or so). Chronicles a mathematically gifted young boy's search for resources and a tutor from whom he can learn more mathematics than his local teachers... (more) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
School Scandalle (2004) |
|
| Marla Weiss |
|
In 80 short chapters (each of which has the word "First" in its title), this book relates the sordid details in the professional life of a computer science and math teacher at a private school in Florida.... (more) |
|
|
A Season of Flirtation (2023) |
|
| Julia Justiss |
|
Lady Laura Pomeroy's interest in mathematics makes her an unsuitable romantic interest in the 19th century:
Few gentlemen, himself included, could view as a prime matrimonial candidate a female who... (more) |
|
|
The Secret Life of Amanda K. Woods (1998) |
|
| Ann Cameron |
|
(A preteen novel, obscurely set in the 50s, only skimmed by
me. I was attracted by the Moebius strip on the cover of the
Scholastic edition. It was a National Book Award finalist, I
presume... (more) |
|
|
Secrets to the Grave (2011) |
|
| Tami Hoag |
|
Mathematician Zander Zahn is suspected of having murdered an artist in this follow-up to the novel "Deeper than the Dead". Almost no mathematics is actually discussed, not even the tiny amount one often... (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) |
|
|
Serial Killer Sudoku (2009) |
|
| Shelley Freydont |
|
In this sequel to The Sudoku Murder, the former government mathematician who has taken over the puzzle museum in her old hometown catches a serial killer who leaves a sudoku at each crime scene. There... (more) |
|
|
Seven Wonders (2014) |
|
| Ben Mezrich |
|
The hero of this conspiracy theory adventure has -- or had -- a twin brother who was an anti-social, OCD math genius precisely following the standard literary stereotype. However, he was murdered after... (more) |
|
|
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974) |
|
| Nicholas Meyer |
|
Meyer presents an alternative view of Sherlock Holmes in this surprising novel: that of a deluded drug addict. In particular, and of interest to those who visit this Website, we learn that Professor Moriarty is only a kindly mathematician who once tutored Holmes in mathematics. The idea that he is a criminal mastermind (as we learn in Conan Doyle's stories) is just part of Holmes' paranoia.
(more) |
|
|
The Shackles of Conviction (2008) |
|
| James R. Meyer |
|
This novel intersperses a fictionalized account of the life of Kurt Gödel with the modern tale of an engineer who realizes (and eventually convinces the world) that Gödel's proof was flawed and that his (more) |
|
|
The Shadow Guests (1980) |
|
| Joan Aiken |
|
After his mother's death, a boy goes to live with his aunt, a
mathematician, in her haunted English house where he meets the ghosts of his ancestors and learns about his family's curse. The mathematician... (more) |
|
|
Sharper than a Sword (1983) |
|
| Alexander Petrovich Kazantsev |
|
The famous Soviet science fiction author Kazantsev wrote this fantasy adventure featuring Pierre de Fermat. as the primary protagonist.
As far as I know, the book is out of print and available only... (more) |
|
|
She is Not Invisible (2013) |
|
| Marcus Sedgwick |
|
In this young adult thriller, a blind teenager and her younger brother search for their missing father, a successful author obsessed with coincidence and the number 354. Although the approach is more supernatural and numerological than mathematical, there is also some flavor of probability and discussion of such things as Benford's Law.
(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) |
|
|
Shooting the Sun (2004) |
|
| Max Byrd |
|
Historical mathematicians Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage play supporting roles in this novel about an expedition into uncharted Indian territory to capture the first photograph of a solar eclipse at... (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) |
|
|
Simple Genius (2007) |
|
| David Baldacci |
|
A small child with an inexplicable ability to factor large numbers threatens the security of the Western world in this political thriller from popular author Baldacci. Although it is nice to see mathematics... (more) |
|
|
Sine of the Magus [aka The Magicians] (1954) |
|
| James Gunn |
|
A private detective is hired to track a magician who turns out not to be an expert at "tricks", but a real and powerful wizard. This is one of those works (see the "similars" list below) in which magic... (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Sinister Researches of C.P. Ransom (1951) |
|
| Homer C. Nearing Jr. |
|
"[D]escribed on the cover as a science fiction novel, which is two
mistakes in three words...it is [mathematical fiction], and it is a
collection of short stories that originally appeared in The Magazine
of... (more) |
|
|
Slightly Perfect / Are you with it? (1941) |
|
| George Malcolm-Smith (Novel) / Sam Perrin (Script) / George Balzer (Script) |
|
Eggheaded actuary Milton Northey Haskins quits his job upon learning that his company has lost money due to his misplaced decimal point and he joins a carnival in the 1941 novel Slightly Perfect. This... (more) |
|
|
Smilla's Sense of Snow (1992) |
|
| Peter Hoeg |
|
"Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen is a part-Inuit Dane who is an expert on
ice and snow, and a mathematician to boot. She is depressed and/or
anxious most of the time, and the story is very dark, depressing,... (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
|
|
Songs My Mother Never Taught Me (2007) |
|
| Selçuk Altun |
|
After his mother's death, a young Turkish man seeks his father's killer. His father was a very charismatic, conceited and famous mathematician, but aside from that there is little math in the book. The... (more) |
|
|
Sophie Simon Solves them All (2010) |
|
| Lisa Graff |
|
A 100-page novel for 2nd graders about a math genius, Sophie Simon, whose parents are always worried that their daughter is not “well-adjusted”. Sophie, on the other hand, wants to do math... (more) |
|
|
Sophie's Diary (2004) |
|
| Dora Musielak |
|
Sophie Germain famously studied mathematics at night by candlelight despite her parents' insistence that she give up this unfeminine discipline. She then went on to become one of the great mathematician's... (more) |
|
|
Sorority House (1956) |
|
| Jordan Park (Cyril M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl) |
|
Sorority House is a lesbian pulp novel written in 1956 by Cyril M. Kornbluth (1923-1958) and Frederik Pohl (1919- ) under the pen name "Jordan Park". The main character is a mentally unstable young... (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
|
|
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) |
|
|
Spherical Mirrors, plane murders (2017) |
|
| Tefcros Michaelides |
|
Essentially all I know about this book is that it is a murder mystery which combines the conquest of Cyprus by Richard the Lionheart during the Crusades with a puzzle of optics posed in Ibn al-Haytham's... (more) |
|
|
The Spoilers (1968) |
|
| Desmond Bagley |
|
June, the daughter of Sir Robert Hellier, a wealthy movie moghul, dies of an overdose of heroin dissolved in a solution of methylamphetamine. So Sir Hellier decides to finance a no-cost-spared war against... (more) |
|
|
Spying on My Dreams (2000) |
|
| Laurence Howard |
|
In my second novel, Spying on My Dreams, my protagonist, a mathematician working for a computer game company, uses fuzzy logic to integrate Eastern and Western thought, and hence finds the meaning of... (more) |
|
|
The Square Root of Murder (2002) |
|
| Paul Zindel |
|
A murder mystery written for a middle school aged audience in which a calculus professor is found pinned to a chalk board by a bolt fired from a crossbow. A formula on the board turns out to be an essential clue (though it involves only elementary arithmetic).
This novel for young readers should not be confused with the adult mystery novel with the same title by Ada Madison.
(more) |
|
|
The Square Root of Murder (2011) |
|
| Ada Madison |
|
Math professor Sophie Knowles turns amateur detective when an unpopular colleague is found dead in his office in this entertaining but light mystery novel.
From reading comments at Amazon, I have learned... (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 Stargazers (1986) |
|
| Barbara Susan Lefever |
|
An historical novel based on Mason and Dixon. (Includes references!) It was self-published in a first printing of 700, and a second printing of 200. The author is/was a member of the Pennsylvania Society... (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) |
|
|
Stay Close, Little Ghost (2013) |
|
| Oliver Serang |
|
This is a bizarre, psychedelic and semi-autobiographical novel about a man named Oliver who has an uncanny ability to find four-leaf clovers, spends much of his time working on a mathematical problem,... (more) |
|
|
The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007) |
|
| Iain Banks |
|
Alban McGill is a reluctant member of a family whose wealth is derived from the creation of an immensely popular board game. The three main plots of the novel (which are intertwined) concern his childhood... (more) |
|
|
Stella Maris (2022) |
|
| Cormac McCarthy |
|
Readers of McCarthy's 2022 novel The Passenger learn quickly that its protagonist's sister was a mathematical prodigy who committed suicide. That isolated fact provides motivation for the remainder of... (more) |
|
|
The Steradian Trail (2013) |
|
| M.N. Krish |
|
This mathematical thriller takes place in India where American computer science professor Joshua Ezekiel is attempting to figure out the twisted criminal plot that his recently murdered student had become... (more) |
|
|
Sticks (2002) |
|
| Joan Bauer |
|
Fifth grader Mickey Vernon gets help from his "math whiz" friend in beating a bully at pool in this novel for children. Some reviewers complained that the plot was slow and that the harping on mathematics... (more) |
|
|
Still She Haunts Me (2001) |
|
| Katie Roiphe |
|
A novel about the life of Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll). I have not
read it, and it most certainly focuses more on his affections for Alice than on
his mathematics, but I suppose there must be... (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) |
|
|
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) |
|
|
The Stranger House (2005) |
|
| Reginald Hill |
|
Sam is a young math student from Australia who travels to England seeking information about her grandmother. She finds that her quest becomes intertwined with that of a Spanish historian investigating... (more) |
|
|
Strike Your Heart (2017) |
|
| Amélie Nothomb |
|
This French novel is primarily about jealousy and how it poisons relationships between women. However, one recurring minor character is a Fields medalist working in topology. Like many mathematicians... (more) |
|
|
Strip Search (2007) |
|
| William Bernhardt |
|
A detective is aided by an autistic child in capturing a serial killer who leaves equations written in the blood of his victims at the scenes of the grisly crimes.
In your MathFiction entry for William... (more) |
|
|
A Study in Seduction (2012) |
|
| Nina Rowan |
|
From the back cover: "A heart divided...a passion multiplied...a love unequalled."
Although you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, I could guess from the image of a shirtless man with no chest hair... (more) |
|
|
The Sudoku Murder (2007) |
|
| Shelley Freydont |
|
With the current popularity of sudoku puzzles, it is not surprising that a mystery novel with this title would appear. As a mystery, this one is quite decent. A mathematician who works for a government... (more) |
|
|
A Suitable Boy (1993) |
|
| Vikram Seth |
|
Sometimes referred to as the longest published English novel, this book about a mother's search for a husband for her daughter in post-colonial India has enough pages to devote a few to mathematics. And,... (more) |
|
|
The Sum of All Kisses (2013) |
|
| Julia Quinn |
|
Lady Sarah Pleinsworth and a mathematician who was crippled in a duel are forced to spend time together. Since they despise each other at the outset, we know from the typical plot arc of the romance novel... (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) |
|
|
Sweet Tooth (2012) |
|
| Ian McEwan |
|
A female mathematics student at the University of Cambridge gets recruited for intelligence work by the MI5. She tries to explain the Monty Hall Problem to her boyfriend (a budding author), but he fails... (more) |
|
|
Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893) |
|
| Lewis Carroll |
|
The sequel to his somewhat popular book "Sylvie and Bruno" never
achieved the popularity of the original. This lack of success may or
may not be related to Chapter VII (entitled "Mein Herr") of the... (more) |
|
|
Symmetry and the Expatriate (2012) |
|
| Tefcros Michaelides |
|
A fictional character obsessed with symmetry is forced by horrific circumstances to travel around Europe in the early 20th century where he meets famous mathematicians, relatives of famous mathematicians,... (more) |
|
|
Szatan Z Siodmej Klasy (1949) |
|
| Kornel Makuszynski |
|
Website visitor David Shay suggested that I add this Polish novel written
for young adults in which one of the characters is an amateur
mathematician attempting to prove Fermat's Last Theorem.
Note... (more) |
|
|
A Szirakuzai Óriás [A Giant of Syracuse] (1959) |
|
| Száva István |
|
This Hungarian novelization of the life of Archimedes was brought to my attention by frequent site contributor Vijay Fafat. Unfortunately, we know very little about it. It has been republished numerous times, but not translated into English AFAIK. If you have read this book and can tell us more about it (especially its mathematical contact), please write. (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) |
|
|
The Tenth Muse (2019) |
|
| Catherine Chung |
|
This wide-ranging work of historical fiction unfolds in the period from just before World War II into the 1960s, in America, Europe and Asia. In the first chapter, the narrator is already an aging mathematician... (more) |
|
|
Tetraktys (2009) |
|
| Ari Juels |
|
A thriller in which a classicist with expertise in cryptography helps to track down a Pythagorean cult that has apparently discovered the ability to factor large integers quickly and therefore can break... (more) |
|
|
The Sleepwalkers (Schlafwandler) (1931) |
|
| Hermann Broch |
|
The third part of
this trilogy contains digressions in which Broch talks about logic,
mathematical axioms, and projective geometry. According to these
digressions, the lack of style of mathematics resembles the style of
modernity.
(more) |
|
|
The Theory of (Not Quite) Everything (2023) |
|
| Kara Gnodde |
|
Mimi Brotherton is a Foley artist in London who creates sound effects for movies. There is not much mathematics in that, but three of the men in her life are mathematicians: her father, her brother, and... (more) |
|
|
The Theory of Death (2015) |
|
| Faye Kellerman |
|
The apparent suicides of a math student and math professor at Kneed Loft College are investigated by a detective, his wife, and a former detective now studying law. It was sufficiently engrossing and... (more) |
|
|
The Theory of Everything (1991) |
|
| Lisa Grunwald |
|
Theoretical physicist Alexander Simon is on the verge of making a
mathematical discovery of tremendous importance. By collapsing the hidden
dimensions in string theory to a 2-dimensional manifold, he... (more) |
|
|
The Thesis of the Absent-Minded Master (1971) |
|
| Vladimir Levshin |
|
[This is the first book in the] trilogy called "The
Master of the Absent-Minded Sciences". The heroes of the other books
(and the author) establish a club, where they analyze the notes (and,
later,letters)... (more) |
|
|
Thinking of Leaving Your Husband? (2010) |
|
| Charlotte Cory |
|
[This] is the book of a series of [BBC] radio comedies from last year, in which the heroine has various unfortunate experiences with internet dating before meeting the perfect partner, who is a mathematician.... (more) |
|
|
Thirteen Diamonds (2000) |
|
| Alan Cook |
|
A murder mystery set in a retirement community in Chapel Hill, NC. During a bridge game at the club, one of the members, a Nobel-laureate in Economics, keels over and dies after receiving a perfect hand... (more) |
|
|
Thomas Gray: Philosopher Cat (1988) |
|
| Philip J. Davis |
|
As the jacket
blurb explains, the book is "a philosophical fireside tale wrapped lightly
around a mathematical problem, revealing scholarly life and attitudes at a
well-known English college. It... (more) |
|
|
The Thousand (2010) |
|
| Kevin Guilfoile |
|
Two competing Pythagorean cults (one "fundamentalist" and the other believing in "further revelations") are behind worldwide disasters such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks and hurricane Katrina in this conspiracy... (more) |
|
|
The Three Body Problem (2004) |
|
| Catherine Shaw |
|
A cleverly titled novel that uses a historical mathematical contest
and several characters based on real mathematicians as the basis for a
murder mystery. Of special interest is the novel's presentation... (more) |
|
|
Three Days in Karlikania (1964) |
|
| Vladimir Levshin |
|
A children's fantasy novel written in Russian. I have not been able to find much about it but Rob Milson says:
Three children travel to Karlikania, an enchanted land populated by numerals. Here they... (more) |
|
|
Three times table (1990) |
|
| Sara Maitland |
|
The story of three generations of women in a British family, with fantasy overtones introduced through the existence of "dragons". I have not read it, and so do not know how significant the mathematical... (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 (1997) |
|
| Sara Douglass |
|
This is another fantasy book in which mathematics is seen as a sort of magic, but in this one it is specifically a particularly evil, cold and inhuman form of magic, in contrast to other less formulaic... (more) |
|
|
Thursday Next: First Among Sequels (2007) |
|
| Jasper Fforde |
|
As Vijay Fafat points out, the eponymous heroine of this series of humorous, fantasy mysteries has a daughter who is a math prodigy. Among other things, in this novel she finds a counter-example to Fermat's... (more) |
|
|
Tigor (aka The Snowflake Constant) (1991) |
|
| Peter Stephan Jungk |
|
In this novel, a mathematics professor is emotionally wounded to the point of temporary insanity by the lack of acceptance of his geometric theory of snowflakes and runs away. His journey takes him to... (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) |
|
|
Time Bends (The Students Tale) in The Rags of Time (2009) |
|
| Maureen Howard |
|
The poetic ramblings of an aging author confined to her New York apartment, who presumably is Maureen Howard herself, include short stories about the ongoing lives of her characters, including the math... (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 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) |
|
|
Touch the Water, Touch the Wind (1972) |
|
| Amos Oz |
|
Amos Oz, the famous Israeli author and political activist, wrote this mathematical, musical and mystical novel about a Holocaust survivor who proves a terribly important theorem about "infinity" while... (more) |
|
|
Touch-Me-Not (2010) |
|
| Cynthia Riggs |
|
In this installment of a series of mystery novels set on Martha's Vineyard, an electrician accidentally murders an employee who was blackmailing him and then is killed himself. Throughout most of the... (more) |
|
|
Trajectory (2024) |
|
| Cambria Gordon |
|
Eleanor, a teenage girl from Philadelphia who has been hiding her impressive mathematical abilities, uses them to aid the military during WW II.
As with many works of fiction aimed at Young Adults,... (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) |
|
|
The Travel Notes of the Absent-Minded Master (1971) |
|
| Vladimir Levshin |
|
This is the second in the Master of the Absent-Minded Sciences trilogy.
The second book is the Master sending letters about his and Little
One's adventures to the Club for continuing analysis.
Levshin's beloved children's books have never been translated into English, but can be read in Russian at lib.rus.ec. (more) |
|
|
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) |
|
| Betty Smith |
|
You may be surprised to see Betty Smith's novel about a girl growing up poor in the early 20th century on this list. In fact, it is a stretch to call this "mathematical fiction". However, the little... (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) |
|
|
Trueman Bradley: Aspie Detective (2012) |
|
| Alexei Maxim Russell |
|
Trueman Bradley moves from a small midwestern town to New York City to establish himself as a private detective. At first people try to discourage him as he seems highly unqualified. Not only has he... (more) |
|
|
Turbulence (2010) |
|
| Giles Foden |
|
A British meteorologist is stationed in Scotland during World War II not to simply run a weather station (which is his cover), but to get to know the brilliant Wallace Ryman and learn to use his mathematical... (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 Delirium (2007) |
|
| Edmundo Paz Soldan |
|
This is a hacker-counter-hacker story set in Bolivia, where the newly resurrected president hires an NSA official to set up the country's counter-espionage / cyber-security unit ("Black Chamber"). The... (more) |
|
|
Twisted (2004) |
|
| Jonathan Kellerman |
|
One of the main characters is a graduate student pursing a Ph.D. in biostatistics, who notes to police detectives that coincidences in the circumstances of several murders are statistically significant,... (more) |
|
|
The Twisted Heart (2009) |
|
| Rebecca Gowers |
|
An English graduate student solves a 19th century murder mystery involving Charles Dickens with the help of her boyfriend, a mathematician.
This book is not yet available in the US and so I have not... (more) |
|
|
Two Moons (2000) |
|
| Thomas Mallon |
|
A historical novel set in Washington DC of the late 19th century in which
astronomers and the Naval Observatory (aided by the "computer" Cynthia May)
deal with scientific and political matters of the... (more) |
|
|
Ultima Dea [The Last Goddess] (1994) |
|
| Gianni Riotta |
|
Unfortunately this book does not appear to have been
translated from the original Italian. One of the central
characters in the book, Alfred Diognetus (described as a
"saint mathematician") is the... (more) |
|
|
Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture (1992) |
|
| Apostolos Doxiadis |
|
This novel, recently (2000) translated from Greek, follows the attempts of
fictional mathematician Petros Papachristos to prove Goldbach's
Conjecture (that every even number greater than two is the sum... (more) |
|
|
A Universe of Sufficient Size (2019) |
|
| Miriam Sved |
|
It is only after the death of her father that an Australian sculptor learns that her mother was one of five Hungarian Jews mathematicians who worked on math research together in a public park as Hitler... (more) |
|
|
Universe of Two (2020) |
|
| Stephen P. Kiernan |
|
A novel about a mathematician who works on the Manhattan Project, focusing primarily on his ethical dilemma and his romance with an organist (who narrates every other chapter). The protagonist, Charlie... (more) |
|
|
The Unknown Quantity (1933) |
|
| Hermann Broch |
|
"Here the main character is a
mathematician who learns, through love and tragedy, that the `unknown
quantity' of life resists mathematical formulation."
(more) |
|
|
The Unknowns: A Mystery (2009) |
|
| Benedict Carey |
|
A novel for middle school children which aims to teach mathematical concepts as the young protagonists try to solve the mystery of the disappearances in their neighborhood.
I thoroughly enjoyed the... (more) |
|
|
Unlocked (2012) |
|
| Courtney Milan |
|
In this novella the heroine's mother is an amateur astronomer computing the orbit of a comet. She has no recognition from professional astronomers. She is invited by her fellow upper class ladies... (more) |
|
|
The Unteleported Man (aka Lies Inc.) (1964) |
|
| Philip K. Dick |
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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) |
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V2: A Novel of World War II (2020) |
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| Robert Harris |
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The plot of this work of historical fiction is based on the following historical fact: A team of British WAAFs stationed in Belgium used mathematics and slide rules to try to determine the location of... (more) |
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The Valley of Fear (1916) |
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| Sir Arthur Conan Doyle |
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Having introduced Sherlock Holmes' most famous enemy, Professor
Moriarty, as a mathematician in an earlier
story, Doyle provides us with just a small glimpse of his
mathematical genius (as opposed to... (more) |
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Vampire World (Trilogy) (1993) |
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| Brian Lumley |
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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) |
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Very in Pieces (2015) |
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| Megan Frazer Blakemore |
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A coming-of-age novel for young adults about a mathematically talented girl named Very Sayles-Woodruff who has trouble fitting in with her family of painters and poets. In one subplot, a teacher has put... (more) |
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Villages (2004) |
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| John Updike |
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The protagonist of this novel is Owen Mackenzie, a character who earned a degree in mathematics in the 1950's and went on to work with computers. His first lover, as well, was a mathematician. They... (more) |
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Vineland (1990) |
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| Thomas Pynchon |
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This novel is Pynchon's bittersweet look at the idealism of the sixties
as seen from the cynicism of the eighties. One key character from the
sixties is the mathematician Weed Atman, first seen studying... (more) |
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The Visiting Professor (1994) |
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| Robert Littell |
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Lemuel Falk, a ``randomnist'' from the Steklov Institute in Russia
gets a visiting position at a chaos research institute in Upstate New
York in this academic farce. He meets a drunkard who studies... (more) |
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Voyage of the Shadowmoon (2002) |
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| Sean McMullen |
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Emperor Warsovran plans to take over the world with Silverdeath, a magical weapon buried centuries ago for fear that its power would be misused. Silverdeath unleashes circles of fiery destruction obeying... (more) |
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War and Peace (1869) |
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| Lev Tolstoy |
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Tolstoy's famous novel about...well, about war and peace (!) contains long passages explaining an analogy he makes between history and calculus. In particular, he argues that we should view history as... (more) |
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Watt (1953) |
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| Samuel Beckett |
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WATT is generally considered a very strange novel, written
in a style best described as "permutational". The narrator
and many of the characters frequently find themselves unable
... (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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The Weight of Numbers (2006) |
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| Simon Ings |
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This is an ambitious novel which attempts to be as overwhelming as Pynchon, to deconstruct what it means to be human like Vonnegut and to tie together bits of history like Forrest Gump. For a few readers,... (more) |
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When Women Were Dragons (2022) |
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| Kelly Barnhill |
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In this fantasy/alternative history novel, many women literally turn into dragons in the 1950's. It is clear to the reader that the sexism of that era is responsible for that magical transformation, 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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Whom the gods love: The story of Evariste Galois (1948) |
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| Leopold Infeld |
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A fictionalized biography of the ill-fated originator of group theory written by
a collaborator of Einstein (better known today for his joint work with Max Born on electrodynamics).
“No professor... (more) |
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The Wild Numbers (1998) |
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| Philibert Schogt |
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Most mathematicians dream of proving a terribly important result. In
this novel, mathematician Isaac Swift
thinks he has done just that: solved "Beauregard's Wild Number
Problem". But is his proof... (more) |
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The Witch of Agnesi (2006) |
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| Robert Spiller |
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Solid murder mystery in which a high school math teacher finds the murderer of three of her best students.
My favorite thing about this book is the way that Bonnie Pinkwater and her boyfriend -- the... (more) |
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The World as I Found It (1987) |
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| Bruce Duffy |
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A fictionalized "biography" of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein
including a portrayal of Bertrand Russell.
"Very enjoyable, but barely scratches the surface of Wittgenstein's life,
work, and character... (more) |
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The World We Make (2022) |
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| N. K. Jemisin |
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Readers of the first novel in the series, The City We Became, have already met Padmini Prakash. She loves pure math and hates New York City, but due to familial pressures is preparing to be a Wall Street... (more) |
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The Wright 3 (2006) |
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| Blue Balliet |
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This is the second mystery book with Calder, Petra and Tommy, where the events take place after those in “Chasing Vermeer”. The main theme in the book is the impending destruction / tear-down... (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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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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Über die Schrift hinaus (2018) |
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| Ulla Berkéwicz |
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The first part of this book is a kind of essay on a "fictional history of
ideas": That an initial, prehistoric life of mind, or spirituality,
which had been esoteric and outside the scope of linguistic
expression,... (more) |
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The Year of the Tiger (1996) |
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| Jack Higgins |
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Cold war spy thriller in which our hero must help an aged Soviet
mathematician escape to our side of the Iron Curtain. (I haven't read the
book, just some reviews, so if there is more to say about it... (more) |
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The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) |
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| Kim Stanley Robinson |
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This alternative history is based on the assumption that the Great Plague
of the 1300s that decimated Europe's population was much worse, and that
it in fact led to the extinction of almost all of... (more) |
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Yesternight (2016) |
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| Cat Winters |
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In this eerie thriller, a school psychologist tries to help parents of a young girl they believe is the reincarnated soul of a mathematical genius who died at the age of 19.
A psychologist fresh out... (more) |
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You Don't Scare Me (2007) |
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| John Farris |
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A math grad student at Yale is haunted by the memory and undead spirit of her abusive stepfather. Using her knowledge of the mathematics of "higher dimensions", she locates the coordinates of the "netherworld"... (more) |
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Your Magic or Mine (2008) |
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| Ann Macela |
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A math professor and botany professor, who happen to be a wizard and a witch, have an academic disagreement regarding the nature of magic. They also happen to be soulmates, though neither of them likes... (more) |
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Zenn Diagram (2018) |
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| Wendy Brant |
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In many ways, this is a typical teen romance novel: it is filled with girls talking about their crushes, some flirting, some kissing, star-crossed lovers overcoming an obstacle to be together, and just... (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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Zombies and Calculus (2014) |
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| Colin Adams |
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The story opens with a math professor teaching his class on a seemingly ordinary day when a student who has arrived late turns out to be the first of a wave of flesh eating zombies who are running amok... (more) |
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