Links

Although they are really more like textbooks than works of fiction, some of you may be interested in ``Life of Fred'', a series of books that uses the character of Fred Gauss to teach basic math to students in an inventive way.

Note that Jody Trout in the math department at Dartmouth has a webpage for the course "Mathematics and Science Fiction" which he has developed.

I also taught a course on Mathematical Fiction through the Honors Program here at the College of Charleston. However, my course focused on fiction in general and not so much on science fiction. The Website for that course is still available here

Look here for a list of mathematics (both real and fictional) in the movies maintained by Arnold Reinhold.

The page above lead Nik Weaver to create a Math in Fiction page. (This link is no longer functioning. Does anyone know if Weaver has moved it to another location or just taken it down? In any case, it is still available at wayback machine's archive of the web from 2004.)

The Society of Actuaries runs an annual fiction contest (see here). If only they were professionally published, I'd include them in the Mathematical Fiction database. In any case, you should certainly take a look at some of these enjoyable and mathematical (from an applied statistics perspective) stories.

Keith Devlin's November 1998 essay "Math Becomes Way Cool" discusses the recent success of math in the movies.

The MAA website maintains a list of math related book reviews, including a few examples of mathematical fiction: MAA Online Fiction Reviews.

Owen Thomas has some interesting, thought provoking reviews of mathematical movies on his Ten Page News site.

Jeff Valure's Math Prose is the home of children's math stories that motivate elementary word problems. The sample stories available on his page are part of a larger saga by this New York school teacher.

An article I wrote offers a "whirl-wind" tour of mathematics in science fiction. The article was published in the April 2004 issue of Math Horizons and is available here as a PDF file.