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A. Botts and the Moebius Strip (1945) |
 | William Hazlett Upson |
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William Hazlett Upson wrote a series of pieces for the Saturday Evening Post about a salesman for The Earthworm Tractor Company, written as a dialog of letters and memos between Alexander Botts and his... (more) |
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According to the Law (1996) |
 | Solvej Balle |
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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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The Adventures of Topology Man (2005) |
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| Alex Kasman |
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Parody is easy....topology is hard!
In this short story, I made use of (and made fun of) the classic superhero comic book genre to illustrate some ideas from topology. So, we end up seeing a battle... (more) |
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The Black Mirror (1983) |
|
| Eric Simon |
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This story (available in "The Black Mirror and Other Stories"
and first published in the anthology, "Ways to Impossibility", 1983) is an interesting twist on the idea of one-sided surfaces. Based on... (more) |
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Calculated Magic (1995) |
|
| Robert Weinberg |
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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) |
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A Deadly Medley of Smedley (2003) |
|
| Feargus Gwynplaine MacIntyre |
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Paradox Patrol officer Julie Anne Callender, with the help of her brother
Gregorian and her uncle Newgate, track down yet again the timecrime master
of evil Smedley Faversham (and atrocious punmeister)... (more) |
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Factoring Humanity (1998) |
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| Robert J. Sawyer |
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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) |
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Flower Arrangement (1959) |
|
| Rosel George Brown |
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I kept smiling throughout this story, which weaves in mathematics without really speaking about it overtly, and at the same time, capturing sardonic commentary about treatment of women in a male-centric... (more) |
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Futurama (Episode: 2-D Blacktop) (2013) |
|
| Michael Rowe (writer) / Raymie Muzquiz (director) |
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In the episode 2-D Blacktop from Futurama's tenth season, Professor Farnsworth invents a device that looks like a tesseract and takes his "hot rod" into the fourth dimension. When he collides with Leela's... (more) |
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The Gangs of New Math (2005) |
|
| Robert W. Vallin |
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This humorous short story about a brawl in a pub of mathematicians appeared in the November 2005 issue of Math Horizons magazine. There is quite a bit of "mathematical name-dropping" in the form of quick... (more) |
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The Gate of the Flying Knives (1979) |
|
| Poul Anderson |
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For his contribution to the first "Thieves' World" collection, Poul Anderson contributed a fantasy story about an illustrated scroll which forms a gateway between dimensions.
As the story progresses,... (more) |
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The Geometrics of Johnny Day (1941) |
|
| Nelson Bond |
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Old MacDonald had a firm, and in that firm he had a young mathematician who wanted to win his daughter's hand in marriage. MacDonald was skeptical:
""Ye want a job, eh? And just what is it that ye... (more) |
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The Geometry of Narrative (1983) |
|
| Hilbert Schenck |
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This story begins with a character who is a graduate student of English proposing to his professor a new geometric approach to literary analysis. As he points out, this has been used to some limited degree... (more) |
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Gospel Truths (2007) |
|
| J.G. Sandom |
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Another novel in the same genre as The Da Vinci Code — an Earth-shaking secret which can destroy the Roman Catholic Church (as a character says, “Can you imagine the headline? ‘Christ... (more) |
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The Heart on the Other Side (1962) |
|
| George Gamow |
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A math professor and his beloved girlfriend try to imagine how they could win the approval of her father for their marriage. She laments that he could only do so by being helpful in her father's profession,... (more) |
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Klein Bottle (1978) |
|
| Cho-Se Hui |
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This is another short Korean tale, where the author has again tried to give a parallel between a situation in real life and a geometrical object, this time the Klein bottle (also see the author’s “The... (more) |
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The Labyrinth Key (2004) |
|
| Howard V. Hendrix |
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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) |
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The Long Slow Orbits (1967) |
|
| H.H. Hollis |
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Tagline: Nice prison! It was a Klein bottle in orbit - easy to escape from, if you didn't mind turning inside out!
A sensitively written, poignant vignette of mankind and society spread out... (more) |
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Lost in the Funhouse (1968) |
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| John Barth |
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According to the "foreward to the Anchor Books Edition", this
collection of short stories is "strung together on a few echoed and developed themes and [circles] back upon itself; not to close a simple... (more) |
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Mobius Strip (1978) |
|
| Cho-Se Hui |
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A very short Korean tale, where the author has tried to give a parallel between a situation in real life and the Möbius strip. The story begins with a Math professor's lecture, where he explains the... (more) |
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The Mobius Trail (1948) |
|
| George Smith |
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One Mr. Joseph Kingsley, after years of toiling and tooling, creates an electrical gadget which ends up acting very much like an open wormhole with both ends of the wormhole accessible, the kind you... (more) |
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Moebius (1996) |
|
| Gustavo Daniel Mosquera R. |
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In this Argentinian film, a mathematician discovers a bizarre topological
explanation for the disappearance of a train in the labrynthian Buenos
Aires subway system. Although based on the short story... (more) |
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The Moebius Room (1952) |
|
| Robert Donald Locke |
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Tagline: “It was more than a vicious circle—it was a vicious square.”
A spy-prisoner with no recollection of most of his identity or history (due to a suppressant chemical) finds himself trapped... (more) |
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Moebius Trip (2006) |
|
| Janny Wurts |
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Featuring an aging mirror-maker who is asked to create a mirror which acts like a moebius strip and shows a reflection of the past and the future. Frankly, I did not think it was done well at all and... (more) |
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Necroscope (Series) (1992) |
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| Brian Lumley |
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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) |
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No-Sided Professor (1946) |
|
| Martin Gardner |
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We all know that among the surprising things you learn when you first
make a Mobius strip is
the fact that out of a two sided piece of paper you can make an object
with only one side. Why should this... (more) |
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Nobody Loves a Moebius Strip (1979) |
|
| Alice Laurance |
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A very warm and fuzzy 2-page story about a living alien creature shaped in the form of a Mobius Strip. It starts off with:
“You could be interested,, even fascinated by one, you could conceivably... (more) |
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Paint ‘Em Green (1967) |
|
| Burt Filer |
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In some far future, after “the Asians had obliterated themselves with a dazzling atomic mistake”, former allies, Ambrija and Russia, found themselves as cold-war opponents once again, in a race for... (more) |
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Paul Bunyan versus the Conveyor Belt (1949) |
|
| William Hazlett Upson |
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A clever "twist" on the usual Mobius band story.
Answers the age old question: How can you win lots of money betting
against poor saps who don't understand topology?
I use this story with children... (more) |
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The Secret Life of Amanda K. Woods (1998) |
|
| Ann Cameron |
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(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) |
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Star, Bright (1952) |
|
| Mark Clifton |
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How would you feel if your daughter could make deep mathematical
discoveries, even when she was a toddler? If you were the parent of
little Star in this story, you'd feel a combination of pride and... (more) |
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A Subway Named Moebius (1950) |
|
| A.J. Deutsch |
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When the MBTA (Boston's Public Transportation authority) introduces a
new line, the topology of the network become so complex that a train
vanishes...lost in some fourth dimensional properties of the... (more) |
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Surfing through Hyperspace (2001) |
|
| Clifford Pickover |
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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) |
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Sword Game (1968) |
|
| H.H. Hollis |
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A topologist manages to create a time-smeared tesseract whose interior moves extremely slowly through time (from our perspecctive) while the exterior moves at the normal pace. He uses the tesseract to... (more) |
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Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893) |
|
| Lewis Carroll |
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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) |
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Touch-Me-Not (2010) |
|
| Cynthia Riggs |
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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) |
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Turnabout (1955) |
|
| Gordon R. Dickson |
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It's a story about a physics professor who is investigating a device that creates planar force-fields. In its first run, an explosion destroys the device and the physicist is trying to obtain an answer... (more) |
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Twisters (1988) |
|
| Paul J. Nahin |
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A medical doctor stumbles onto a dangerous trap in this short story which
was published in Analog (Vol CVIII No 6, May 1988). The twisted
donuts sold by the new shop he passes on the way to work turn out to be
Klein bottles (a topological oddity like the Mobius strip). (more) |
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Unknown Things (1989) |
|
| Reginald Bretnor |
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A very short, well-written horror story about a collector, Andreas Hoogstraten. a wealthy man with an obsession with unusual objects. The narrator, one Mr. Dennison, a dealer in the antiques and the... (more) |
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The Wall of Darkness (1946) |
|
| Arthur C. Clarke |
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In a universe consisting of one star and one planet, there is a
mysterious impenetrable wall surrounding the entire planet in the deep
freezing southlands. Two men, one with money, the other... (more) |
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