a list compiled by Alex Kasman (College of Charleston)
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Algorithms and Nasal Structures (1998)
Lois H. Gresh
This short story appears "in Aboriginal Science Fiction, Summer 1998.
CS grad student is having trouble programming sheep odors.
The story competently uses real programming terminology
(stacks, queues, etc). Includes a wee bit of trigonometry." (Contributed by William E. Emba.)
Votes So Far: 0All on a Golden Afternoon (1956)
Robert Bloch
"The title alludes to Alice in Wonderland, and the story is
indeed partly set in the two dream books. One Professor Laroc
has extended some mathematical work of Charles Dodgson, and by
...
Votes So Far: 0Antibodies (2000)
Charles Stross
P vs NP is perhaps the greatest problem of theoretical computer science,
and has attracted attention of a range of mathematicians, from logic
to topology. It's one of the seven Clay Millennium Prize...
Votes So Far: 0The Ethical Equations (1945)
Murray Leinster
Mathematics is invoked several times to formalize `what goes
round, comes around' as if it were a law of nature. 100% hokey.
The only thing worse than the bad math is the bad science.
...
Votes So Far: 0Fillet of Man (1995)
Eliot Fintushel
A first contact short short. Prime numbers are the way humans
and the aliens recognize each other. And the alien spaceship
"looked like a topologist's diagram of an exploded torus".
Published in ASIMOV'S (Sept 95) pp112-115.
Votes So Far: 0The Fourth-Dimensional Demonstrator (1950)
Murray Leinster
Uses the fourth dimension as geewhiz terminology to explain
a matter duplicator/unduplicator. Includes a tesseract.
But if you ignore the story's explanation involving time as
...
Votes So Far: 0The Future Engine (1995)
Byron Tetrick
Charles Babbage's son calls on Sherlock Holmes to investigate the
theft of the Analytic Engine from its warehouse. The son gives a
description of its importance to mathematical calculations. But
it's his mention of the role of the binomial theorem in its working
that arouses Holmes's interest.
Published in Mike Resnick and M H Greenberg (eds) SHERLOCK HOLMES IN ORBIT.
Votes So Far: 0The Geometry of Love (1966)
John Cheever
"Starring an engineer who takes solace in geometry." (Contributed by
"William E. Emba".) Appears in the collection "The Stories of John
Cheever" (see link).
Published originally in The Saturday Evening Post Jan 1 1966.
Votes So Far: 0The 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...
Votes So Far: 0Heavy 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).
Votes So Far: 0Hypatia (2000)
Mac Wellman
Artistically produced off-Broadway play about the famous female
mathematician who was tortured to death by Christian monks in the 5th
Century.
Votes So Far: 0The Last Magician (1952)
Bruce Elliott
Science-fiction story about a magician performing for aliens using a Klein bottle as a prop.
Votes So Far: 0A Matter of Mathematics (1999)
Brian Wilson Aldiss
A space/time shortcut is found connecting the earth to the moon. Its use
provokes an alien response, consisting of a device encoding within it some
very strange mathematics.
(For those interested, the title story of the Aldiss collection was the
original inspiration for Kubrick/Spielberg's AI.)
Also published as "The Apollo Asteroid". In Crowther and Greenberg (eds)
"Moon Shots".
Votes So Far: 0Miscalculations (2000)
Elizabeth Mansfield
This is one of two "romance novels" listed on the mathematical fiction webpage. It concerns a woman who is a "math whiz" that is
hired to help an attractive millionaire handle his wealth. (For those who are interested, the other official romance novel here is The Dark Lord).
If you have read this book and can correct/add to the description above,
please write to me at kasmana@cofc.edu.
Votes So Far: 0The 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.
Votes So Far: 0N Day (1943)
Philip Latham
An astronomer's observations of the sun lead him to predict the sun will go nova in just a few days. The formula that he used for his prediction is included explicitly. "Philip Latham" is
the pseudonym of Robert Shirley Richardson.
Votes So Far: 0Nice Girl with Five Husbands (1951)
Fritz Leiber
A man is unwittingly swept by a time wind 100 years
into the future. He and the people he meets in the
future--including the nice girl of the title--talk
at cross purposes, but no one realizes...
Votes So Far: 0One, True Platonic Heaven: A Scientific Fiction of the Limits of Knowledge (2003)
John L. Casti
A novel about the limits of scientific knowledge set at the Institute for
Advanced Study at Princeton. Mathematicians Kurt Gödel and John von
Neumann are among the principle characters (along with Albert...
Votes So Far: 0Rooster: 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...
Votes So Far: 0San (2000)
Lan Samantha Chang
A short story in the collection "Hunger" about a girl who becomes interested in mathematics (especially probability) when her gambler father deserts his family. She does not succeed as a college student and learns in the end that in both math and life, it is the mysteries (and not their solutions) which are of real interest.
Votes So Far: 0Sidewise in Time (1950)
Murray Leinster
"The protagonist is a frustrated mathematician, whose genius
(which Leinster makes some attempt to convey) is not recognized
by his teachers and peers. So when reality goes...
Votes So Far: 0Silence Please (1954)
Arthur C. Clarke
In this
"White Hart" story, Purvis tells about an experimental
physicist who invents a highly successful antinoise generator.
The Fourier analysis underpinning of antinoise is explicitly
...
Votes So Far: 0Souls in the Great Machine (1999)
Sean McMullen
Souls in the Great Machine, McMullen's new one, is apparently a
post-ecological-apocalypse SF novel in which a powerful
multiprocessing computer is built out of human beings manipulating
abaci. Has...
Votes So Far: 0The Tale of the Big Computer (aka The End of Man?) (1966)
Hannes Alfven (writing as Olof Johannesson)
"Alfven, the Swedish physicist and astrophysicist who was
awarded the Nobel prize for his development of plasma physics
and magnetohydrodynamics (but is perhaps better remembered
...
Votes So Far: 0Three 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...
Votes So Far: 0The 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."
Votes So Far: 0The Unteleported Man (aka Lies Inc.) (1964)
Philip K. Dick
In the future, earth is overcrowded, and nearly the only
relief is provided by one-way teleportation to a star
system
several light years away,...
Votes So Far: 0Visitors from Oz : The Wild Adventures of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodsman (1999)
Martin Gardner
You wouldn't believe it, but the famous popular math writer
produced a sequel to the Oz books in which Dorothy travels to New York
City through a Klein bottle (built out of two Mobius strips by the
same fellow who built the Tin Man). I have not read the book, but it
apparently involves a mathematical puzzle of some sort.
Votes So Far: 0Ylem (1994)
Eliot Fintushel
Another Fintushel Big-Bang-And-Back Totally-Weird adventure,
the plot concerns a business conflict in the helium market.
Somebody dickered with the primordial nucleosynthesis, and
...
Votes So Far: 01963 (1993)
Alan Moore
A six-issue series, one of the best of the retro comics out
there. this is Moore's ingenious pastiche of Marvel comics in
the critical (for Marvel and for the world) year 1963. Strange
things...
Votes So Far: 12+2=5 (2006)
Rudy Rucker / Terry Bisson
A retired insurance adjuster and a math professor who was fired for telling his students that there are "holes" in the number line pass the time by trying to break a world record for counting. To achieve...
Votes So Far: 121 (2008)
Robert Luketic (Director)
As I understand it, the book by Ben Mezrich which inspired this film is non-fiction. It told the true story (though using pseudonyms) of a team comprised of an MIT math professor and six MIT students...
Votes So Far: 1Advanced 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...
Votes So Far: 1The Adventure of the Russian Grave (1995)
William Barton / Michael Capobianco
17 years after the death of Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes comes across some loose ends
involving Moriarty. Following these clues down into eastern Siberia with
Watson, a set of mathematical calculations...
Votes So Far: 1Against the Odds (2001)
Martin Gardner
Luther Washington, a young, African-American boy in Butterfield, KS must overcome several kinds of prejudice to become a mathematician.
First, he must face the prejudices of his father that his interest...
Votes So Far: 1Aleph Sub One (1948)
Margaret St. Clair
This is a little known story by a well known author from the Golden Age of Science Fiction. The math content is high, and it's a good story, definitely belongs on your Mathematical Fiction page.
From...
Votes So Far: 1Alphabet (2002)
Chelsea Spear
A silent, short film which shows intertwined clips of a young girl playing the french horn and answering a question at the board in her algebra class. Reviews of the film that I've read suggest that she...
Votes So Far: 1Amy and Isabelle (1998)
Elizabeth Stout
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...
Votes So Far: 1Another New Math (2005)
Alex Kasman
A mathematician and his young daughter try to convince a school board to consider teaching advanced mathematics to elementary school children in this short story that appeared in the collection Reality...
Votes So Far: 1Apartheid, Superstrings and Mordecai Thubana (1991)
Michael Bishop
I don't want to get into a debate here about whether superstrings are math or physics. I know mathematicians and physicists who would argue (with some good points on each side) that it is in their area...
Votes So Far: 1The Appendix and the Spectacles (1928)
Miles J. Breuer (M.D.)
There sometimes seems to be an unlimited supply of stories based on
the idea that we may be unaware of extra dimensions around us (just
like the inhabitants of Flatland). But, each
one has its own special features. Here we see it from a medical
perspective: what are the implications for surgery and malpractice?
Appears in Mathematical Magpie.
Votes So Far: 1The Arnold Proof (2002)
Jessica Francis Kane
This short story begins with a quote from Philip E.B. Jourdain's essay "The Nature of Mathematics". In the quote, he explains how in the process of carrying out a complicated computation, one may want...
Votes So Far: 1Back to Methuselah (1921)
George Bernard Shaw
In this not-very-stageable play in five parts, Shaw expounds on
mankind and the theory of evolution, from Adam and Eve in the
Garden of Eden to a paradise world 30,000 years in the future.
It turns...
Votes So Far: 1Bad 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...
Votes So Far: 1Belonging to Karovsky (2002)
Kathryn Schwille
This short story, published in the literary magazine Crazyhorse concerns the boring and lonely Mr. Digby who was the downstairs neighbor of Karovsky, the brilliant (but of course, seriously insane) mathematician...
Votes So Far: 1The Birds (BC414)
Aristophanes
In one scene of this classic Greek play, the geometer Meton appears
and...well, it's pretty short. So why should I summarize it when I can
simply reproduce it here!
(Enter
METON, With surveying...
Votes So Far: 1BLIT (1988)
David Langford
Goedelian incompleteness is encoded in graphic images that
kill viewers. A new kind of infoterrorism spreads.
Originally published in INTERZONE #25 Sept/Oct 1988.
See also a fake FAQ...
Votes So Far: 1Bloom (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.
Votes So Far: 1Blowups Happen (1940)
Robert A. Heinlein
A mathematician discovers that his formulas predict that an important
new power station poses an extremely grave risk to humanity, and he
must convince others of the danger.
reprinted in THE PAST THROUGH TOMORROW.
At least temporarily available in HTML format at webscription.net.
Votes So Far: 1Boltzmann's Ghost (1998)
Ken Wharton
A physicist encounters an apparently crazy man who tries to convince him
that some beings experience time backwards. His intriguing explanation of
this phenomenon depends on theoretical physics, and...
Votes So Far: 1The 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...
Votes So Far: 1Borzag and the Numerical Apocalypse (2006)
Jason Earls
I must warn you that I am a trained mathematician, but NOT a trained expert on literature. Among other consequences, this means that I sometimes have trouble telling the difference between brilliant,...
Votes So Far: 1A 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...
Votes So Far: 1The 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...
Votes So Far: 1Cantor's War (1974)
Christopher Anvil
In my opinion, this story is slanderous and the author should be ashamed.
The plot involves a science fiction scenario in which the human military is battling aliens in "tau space". Whenever we send...
Votes So Far: 1Cardano and the Case of the Cubic (2005)
Jeff Adams
This parody of early 20th century "Hard Boiled Private Detective" novels is instead a short story about 16th century mathematician Gerolamo Cardano.
It's opening paragraphs clearly set the tone:
It...
Votes So Far: 1The Case of the Murdered Mathematician (2001)
Julia Barnes / Kathy Ivey
This story is actually a fictionalized account of the "Murder Mystery" game
played by the MAA Student Mathematics Club at Western Carolina University.
Clues provide insight into possible motivations...
Votes So Far: 1A Catastrophe Machine (2004)
Charles Scholz
A well-written, vaguely surrealistic story loosely based on the real mathematical field of catastrophe theory and set within the context of the Vietnam War.
The title is taken from an invention of mathematician...
Votes So Far: 1The Chair of Philanthromathematics (1908)
O. Henry (William Sydney Porter)
Jeff Peters and Andy Tucker, con men in
the O. Henry stories collected in this volume, are a bit
uncomfortable after scoring a really big scam. So they
...
Votes So Far: 1Children 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...
Votes So Far: 1Child's Play (1986)
Isaac Asimov
Young Griswold uses something he just learned
in elementary school math class to solve a minor stumper. (Be
warned: the problem has a minor bug. Change "mix" to "nix".)
Published in the...
Votes So Far: 1Cliff 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...
Votes So Far: 1Cocoon 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...
Votes So Far: 1The 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...
Votes So Far: 1Comrades 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...
Votes So Far: 1Context (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...
Votes So Far: 1The Crime of the Mathematics Professor (1960)
Clarice Lispector
There is very little mathematical content to this story of a math professor attempting to atone for having abandoned a pet dog. He is described (in the English translation) as having a "cold, mathematical...
Votes So Far: 1Crimes and Math Demeanors (2007)
Leith Hathout
The short mysteries in this book remind me of "Encyclopedia Brown". After a brief description of a sometimes contrived dilemma facing our young detective -- 14 year old Ravi -- you are given an opportunity...
Votes So Far: 1The Cube Root of Conquest (1948)
Rog Phillips
An evil dictator's plan to destroy and conquer the world is based on the
work of one of his scientists, which allows travel into complex components
of time. In order to do this, one is required to solve...
Votes So Far: 1Dark Integers (2007)
Greg Egan
A sequel to "Luminous". Ten years later, Bruno, Alison, and Yuen have maintained a secret peace treaty with the "other side", the world that exists with other axioms and laws of arithmetic; they can...
Votes So Far: 1The 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...
Votes So Far: 1A Deadly Medley of Smedley (2003)
Feargus Gwynplaine MacIntyre
Paradox Patrol officer Julie Anne Callender, with the help of her brother
Gregorian and her uncle Newgate, track down yet again the timecrime master
of evil Smedley Faversham (and atrocious punmeister)...
Votes So Far: 1Death 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)...
Votes So Far: 1Deception (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...
Votes So Far: 1Delicious Rivers (2006)
Ellen Maddow
This collage of absurd and entertaining scenes at a NYC post office (and the music and choreography to which they are performed) were all inspired by the mathematics of Penrose Tilings. In particular,...
Votes So Far: 1Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World (1666)
Margaret Cavendish
Although there is only a short discussion of mathematics, I had to include it because it is just too interesting that this is not only one of the oldest science-fiction stories but moreover the fact that...
Votes So Far: 1The Devil a Mathematician Would Be (1962)
A.J. Lohwater
This clever short story that captures the feeling of a math problem that "gets under your skin" was printed in
The Mathematical Magpie
and was said to have been "collected" by A.J. Lohwater. Well, I...
Votes So Far: 1The Devil You Don't (1970)
Keith Laumer
The devil (who is not such a bad guy after all) seeks help from a quantum physics expert to fight off some aliens (who are not so evil either) that happen to disrupt the "Randomness Field". This disruption...
Votes So Far: 1The 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...
Votes So Far: 1Dragon'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...
Votes So Far: 1Drode's Equations (1981)
Richard Grant
When this story takes place, the fictional "Drode's Equations" have been
lost for so long that they have become practically mythological. And so
the historian protagonist is surprised to find them in...
Votes So Far: 1Drunkard'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...
Votes So Far: 1Echoes 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...
Votes So Far: 1En 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...
Votes So Far: 1Eon (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...
Votes So Far: 1Euclid Alone (1975)
William F. Orr
An administrator in the math department of a major research institute
has to decide how to handle a paper which proves the inconsistency of
Euclidean geometry.
Votes So Far: 1A Fable for Moderns (1955)
Lord Dunsany
A bank employee becomes bored with the restrictions of arithmetic and decides to let his mathematical computations enjoy the freedom of "modern" poets and artists. Although he loses his job at the bank,...
Votes So Far: 1The 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...
Votes So Far: 1The Fairytale of the Completely Symmetrical Butterfly (2003)
Dietmar Dath
I have long thought that Emmy Noether deserved to be the heroine of a work of mathematical fiction. I had even begun writing a story of my own to fill this gap. But, have no fear, since Dietmar Dath...
Votes So Far: 1The Fall of a Sparrow (1998)
Robert Hellenga
In this novel, a man travels to Italy to testify at the trial of the terrorists who murdered his daughter in a 1980 train bombing. Florin Diacu, a mathematician who has written about chaos theory and...
Votes So Far: 1Falling Umbrella (2002)
Julia Whitty
In this short story, an aging mathematician witnesses a woman with an umbrella jumping (falling?) off of the Golden Gate bridge. Mathematical terminology is tossed around reasonably well ("proofs by contradiction",...
Votes So Far: 1The Fifth-Dimension Catapult (1931)
Murray Leinster
This short novel, originally published in the January 1931 ASTOUNDING,
and republished by Damon Knight in SCIENCE FICTION OF THE 30'S (1975),
involves a mathematical physicist whose theories get applied...
Votes So Far: 1The Five Hysterical Girls Theorem (2000)
Rinne Groff
I think this play about a number theory conference at the British seaside at the turn of the 20th century may be misunderstood. The plot revolves around the neuroses of the senior researcher, Moses Vazsonyi,...
Votes So Far: 1Flowers 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...
Votes So Far: 1Forbidden Knowledge (1987)
Kathryn Cramer
Mathematical statements can sound pretty strange, practically humorous, when you don't know the technical definitions of the terms. This somewhat frightening story has such a statement as its punchline....
Votes So Far: 1The Franklin's Tale (in The Canterbury Tales) (1390)
Geoffrey Chaucer
Aurelius of Brittany greatly desires Dorigen, a married woman who has
not seen her husband, the knight, for some years. Dorigen puts off
Aurelius's advances by promising that she will yield when he...
Votes So Far: 1Frobenius: A Sesquilogue
Lee Rudolph
A fictionalized account of the life of Hamilton as remembered by
Frobenius (in verse). (A slightly different version was published in
the Mathematical Intelligencer.)
Votes So Far: 1FYI (1961)
James Blish
This story contains a brief explanation of the transfinite cardinals
and their arithmetic as part of a scary bit of science fiction. Why,
you may ask (and the character in the story does), do the transfinite
cardinals...
Votes So Far: 1Galactic Pot-Healer (1969)
Philip K. Dick
Joe Fernwright, mender of broken pottery in some future Earth
society, but bored out of his mind after months without any pots
to fix, accepts a mysterious invitation to a far planet where...
Votes So Far: 1The 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,...
Votes So Far: 1The Genius (1901)
Nikolai Georgievich Garin-Mikhailovskii
The Russian Engineer N.G. Mikhailovskii (1852-1906) was also an accomplished author using the pseudonym "N.G. Garin". His short story, "The Genius", tells about an Jewish man who fills his notebooks with...
Votes So Far: 1The Geometrics of Johnny Day (1941)
Nelson Bond
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...
Votes So Far: 1The Geometry of Narrative (1983)
Hilbert Schenck
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...
Votes So Far: 1Getting the Combination (1982)
Isaac Asimov
Griswold figures out a combination by correctly guessing
the next number in a sequence.
AKA "Playing the Numbers". Published originally in the June 1982 issue of Gallery.
Votes So Far: 1Ghost Dancer (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...
Votes So Far: 1The Giant Claw (1957)
Fred F. Sears (director)
Known as possibly one of the worst horror movies of the 20th century, The Giant Claw tells the story of a huge bird from an anti-matter universe who terrorizes airplane pilots (but apparently, not movie...
Votes So Far: 1Gomez (1954)
C.M. Kornbluth
this story is about a physics prodigy, but a mathematical equation
appears in it -- the first time I read story the equation didn't make any
sense to me, but eventually I realized that it was a...
Votes So Far: 1The Grass and Tree (2003)
Eliot Fintushel
The Banach-Tarski paradox is invoked repeatedly as the underlying
explanation for shapeshifting. And higher-dimensional generalizations
prove crucial to the plot. The author goes so far as to cite...
Votes So Far: 1Gulliver's Posthumous Travels to Riemann's Land and Lobachevskia (1947)
William Pepperell Montague
In this sequel to Swift's classic Gulliver's Travels (which is also mathematical), Barnard College philosopher Montague tells us of his dreams in which
Gulliver shares with him the non-Euclidean geometry...
Votes So Far: 1Gut 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...
Votes So Far: 1Hamisch in Avalon (1995)
Eliot Fintushel
This story marks the return of the Yiddishe mystic Izzy and his daughter
in-law (now a math professor) Hamisch previously encountered in Izzy at the Lucky Three. There isn't as much math in
this story,...
Votes So Far: 1Herbrand's Conjecture and the White Sox Scandal (1993)
Eliot Fintushel
Hi, I'm Eliot Fintushel, the author of HERBRAND'S CONJECTURE AND THE WHITE
SOX SCANDAL. The idea is that the mathematical logician Jacques Herbrand
who actually did die in a mountaineering accident...
Votes So Far: 1The 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...
Votes So Far: 1Hilbert's Hotel (1999)
Ian Stewart
Another take on the idea (attributed to lectures by David Hilbert) that the bizarre properties of the countably infinite can best be presented through the analogy of a hotel. Here, Mr. and Mrs. Smith...
Votes So Far: 1A Hill on the Dark Side of the Moon (1983)
Lennart Hjulström
A Swedish film about the life of Sonia Kovalevsky. The title refers,
apparently, to a site on the moon which was actually named in her
honor. (Has anyone seen this film? I would appreciate comments...
Votes So Far: 1The Holmes-Ginsbook Device (1969)
Isaac Asimov
A scientist recounts how, stung by his former professor
hogging all the credit for figuring out a way to safely
light cigarettes and girlwatch at the same time, he and
...
Votes So Far: 1Holy 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...
Votes So Far: 1Hypatia: New Foes with an Old Face (1852)
Charles Kingsley
A fictionalized account of the life and murder of Hypatia, once
recognized as the greatest living mathematician in the Greco-Roman world. This
book, written in 1852 by Reverend Kingsley, focuses more...
Votes So Far: 1The 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,...
Votes So Far: 1I padroni del caos (2003)
A. Russo (writer) / Esposito Brothers (artists)
An Italian comic book whose title translates as "Masters of Chaos".
Not much mathematics in here, but several of the characters are mathematicians. They've better
not talk about mathematics (the writer...
Votes So Far: 1I 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...
Votes So Far: 1Immortal Bird (1961)
H. Russell Wakefield
Professor Brandley, a "young" man of 53, wants nothing more than to attain the position of Regius Professor of Pure Mathematics at the Metropolitan University in London so that he could train "disciples...
Votes So Far: 1Immune Dreams (1978)
Ian Watson
A creepy but interesting story that combines the genetics of cancer, the neurology of dreaming, immunology, and the mathematics of catastrophe theory (a precursor of what we now call "chaos theory"). ...
Votes So Far: 1In Fading Suns and Dying Moons (2003)
John Varley
There is an explicit reference not only to mathematics, but to mathematical fiction in this scary short story. When strange creatures with an unusual interest in butterflies begin appearing on the Earth, it takes a mathematician and familiarity with Abbott's Flatland to understanding what is going on.
Votes So Far: 1In Good King Charles's Golden Days (1939)
George Bernard Shaw
Considered by many to be Shaw's worst play, this late example of his
witty writing may be of special interest to visitors to this site. It
takes place at the home of Sir Isaac Newton where he is joined...
Votes So Far: 1In the River (2006)
Justin Stanchfield
A female mathematics professor undergoes a surgical procedure to enable her to live and communicate with aquatic aliens. Her goal is to learn to understand their mathematics well enough to reproduce their...
Votes So Far: 1The Indefatigable Frog (1953)
Philip K. Dick
A parody of science utilizing the old "Zeno's Paradox". Originally appeared in Fantastic Story Magazine (July 1953) and republished
recently in The Ascent of Wonder.
Votes So Far: 1The Infinite Plane (1981)
Paul J. Nahin
As a student, Richard Mackley discussed some philosophical aspects of the
mathematical abstraction of an infinite plane with his math
professor. For instance, they noted that the plane would look the...
Votes So Far: 1Infinitely Near (1999)
Anthony Cristiano
An 8 minute long, black and white film with no dialogue showing intertwined scenes of a student having trouble with the concept of a limit in his calculus class and other scenes from his life. The director...
Votes So Far: 1Infinity (1996)
Patricia Broderick
It's about the early years of Richard Feynman, up to the completion
of the Manhattan Project, and the death of his wife.
What I like particularily is a scene in NY's Chinatown where [Feynman]
races...
Votes So Far: 1Into the Comet (1960)
Arthur C. Clarke
When a computer malfunction prevents the crew of a spaceship from being able to determine a trajectory back to Earth, they are forced to resort to using an abacus to aid in the computation. [Note that...
Votes So Far: 1Intoxicating Heights (Höhenrausch. Die Mathematik des XX. Jahrhunderts in
zwanzig Gehirnen) (2003)
Dietmar Dath
Word by word I would translate Dath's "Höhenrausch" as "High-altitude
Euphoria. Mathematics of the 20th century in 20 brains". It is a
collection of short stories and fictional portraits of (I copy...
Votes So Far: 1It was the Monster from the Fourth Dimension (1951)
Al Feldstein
I found a story from a Weird Science issue of 1951 (i believe it's # 7) titled It Was the Monster From the Fourth Dimension. It's written and drawn by Al Feldstein.
It is about a farmer whose farm...
Votes So Far: 1It's My Turn (1980)
Claudia Weill (director)
About a mathematician who writes a proof of the Snake Lemma at the
speed of
light. Her love interest was Michael Douglas, some sort of athlete.
One mathematician I know claims he wrote a paper just...
Votes So Far: 1Izzy at the Lucky Three (1996)
Eliot Fintushel
There are two kinds of weird: good weird and bad weird. This story
is the third kind. I mean, what can you say about a story in which the
Yiddishe mystic Izzy encounters
the demon spirit who created...
Votes So Far: 1Jumpers (1989)
Tom Stoppard
A main character considers Zeno's paradox and infinitesimals and imagines a circle as a limit of polygons.
Votes So Far: 1Kavanagh (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.)
Votes So Far: 1Kavita Through Glass (2002)
Emily Ishem Raboteau
A loosely practicing Muslim graduate student in mathematics
has great difficulty understanding his Hindu wife. He tries
to understand her, love, and life in general via mathematics,
regarding which...
Votes So Far: 1Killing 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...
Votes So Far: 1The Killion (1982)
Ian Frazier
Fans of Monty Python will recall the joke so funny that anyone who reads it dies laughing. Frazier brings us the mathematical analogue: a number so big that it kills anyone who tries to think about it. This is the only mathematical story in the funny collection called "Dating your Mom".
Votes So Far: 1The Kissing Number (1992)
Ian Stewart
Published as part of his "Mathematical Recreations" column in Scientific
American (February 1992), this story concerns human colonists on Mars
who are trying to figure out how many non-overlapping "circular"...
Votes So Far: 1La formula di Ramanujan (2001)
Marco Abate (writer) / P. Ongaro (artist)
A trip from Berkeley to India via Oxford to recover the lost Ramanujan's notebooks, pursued independently
by two (again, realistic) mathematicians, both driven by revenge, though of different kind.
Along...
Votes So Far: 1The Legend of Howard Thrush (2005)
Alex Kasman
I always have enjoyed the American folk tale, a medium in which one pretends to be speaking earnestly and in all sincerity about a history so ridiculous that it it simply cannot be taken seriously. There...
Votes So Far: 1The 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...
Votes So Far: 1life.exe (2006)
Jason Rogers
This work of fiction is not strictly narrative. It is hard to say what is happening since the characters live in the world of "the matrix". Not like the Wachowski Bros.'s epic trilogy of films (though...
Votes So Far: 1The Limit of Delta Y Over Delta X (1994)
Richard Cumyn
Here is a calculus example from a book with a title that can not
be more mathematical. I printed this one in a calculus book that I
wrote for my business/economics calculus class. I also read it out...
Votes So Far: 1Little 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...
Votes So Far: 1The Logic Pool (1997)
Stephen Baxter
The Logic Pool deals with an intelligence that is similar
to the meme-minds in Gregory Benford's Foundations Fear.
Meme-mind -- I think this means some sort of intelligence whose
existence arises...
Votes So Far: 1Lord Darcy (1966)
Randall Garrett
The stories in this collection of fantastical murder mysteries take place in an alternate universe where magic rather than science has become the primary human tool for manipulating the world. Frequent...
Votes So Far: 1The 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...
Votes So Far: 1Magic 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.
Votes So Far: 1Math Takes a Holiday (2001)
Paul Di Filippo
Saint Hubert and Saint Barbara, the two patron saints of mathematics,
pay a visit to a devout Catholic mathematics professor who has been
praying for a mathematical miracle to silence his mockers....
Votes So Far: 1The Mathematical Magpie: Being more stories, mainly transcendental, plus subjects of essays, rhymes, music, anecdotes, ... (1962)
Clifton Fadiman (editor)
This is the second of the two wonderful, classic collections of
mathematically flavored literature and such by Clifton Fadiman. (The
first was "Fantasia Mathematica".)
CONTENTS:
Cartoon by Abner...
Votes So Far: 1The Mathematics of Magic (1940)
L. Sprague de Camp / Fletcher Pratt
The "Enchanter Stories" by de Camp and Pratt are a very popular series of SF/fantasy stories whose protagonist, Harold Shea, is able to travel to other universes using symbolic logic. "The Mathematics...
Votes So Far: 1Maxwell's Equations (2005)
Alex Kasman
James Clerk Maxwell was the 19th century theoretician who discovered electro-magnetic waves. He is often described as a "physicist", but I would argue that he was a mathematician. Certainly some of his...
Votes So Far: 1The Measure of Eternity (2006)
Sean McMullen
The beautiful servant of an even more beautiful courtesan leaves the palace in an ancient city and finds a beggar proudly shouting "I have nothing" in many different languages. Yet, this beggar seems...
Votes So Far: 1Milo and Sylvie (2000)
Eliot Fintushel
"Shapeshifting is treated as a form of Banach-Tarski
equidecomposition. And part of a Zorn's Lemma proof
is given explicitly."
This story appeared in the March 2000...
Votes So Far: 1The Monopole Affair (2003)
Ken Wharton
This short story in the May 2003 issue of Analog by physicist
Wharton includes references to the role of higher dimensions in string
theory.
References to string theory, but much more about physics than math (which gets a passing mention).
Votes So Far: 1Moriarty by Modem (1995)
Jack Nimersheim
A cyberversion of Sherlock Holmes is created to track down an accidently
released cyberversion of Moriarty. The big clue involves both the binomial
theorem and binomial variables.
Published in...
Votes So Far: 1Mozart on Morphine (1989)
Gregory Benford
A mathematician nearly loses his life to appendicitis. While
sedated in the hospital, he describes the loony stuff that flits through his
head, and how it relates to the subjective and personal processes...
Votes So Far: 1Murder, She Conjectured (2005)
Alex Kasman
A police psychologist attending a conference in Cambridge, England is pulled into an unsolved murder mystery by her mathematician boyfriend. An important theme of the story is the oppresive sexism that...
Votes So Far: 1The N-Plus-1th-Degree (1968)
Stephen Barr
A mathematician is accused of murdering a man who flirted with his wife. Her faith in him (which is so strong, she describes it as being to the n-plus-1th degree) allows her to figure out how and by...
Votes So Far: 1Nachman (1998)
Leonard Michaels
An American mathematician attends a conference in Poland, the country in which his grandparents were killed in a Nazi concentration camp. This is during the Cold War, and the American consul warns him...
Votes So Far: 1Nachman at the Races (1999)
Leonard Michaels
In Michaels' third Nachman story, we learn that the UCLA mathematician enjoys attending horse races -- apparently his only emotional outlet besides his mathematics research. There is discussion of the...
Votes So Far: 1Nachman Burning (1998)
Leonard Michaels
In this story, the reclusive UCLA mathematician Nachman, a recurring character in stories by Leonard Michaels, gets a haircut. He chooses a barber he knows to be terrible at cutting hair, but he goes...
Votes So Far: 1Nachman from Los Angeles (2002)
Leonard Michaels
This second "Nachman" story by Leonard Michaels is a flashback to a time when the UCLA mathematician was a graduate student and hired by a rich Arabian prince to ghostwrite a philosophy paper for him....
Votes So Far: 1Naturally (Double Whammy) (1954)
Fredric Brown
Fredric Brown, a prolific and acclaimed writer of mystery
and science fiction stories and novels, was an extraordinary
master of the short-short. "Naturally" is a one-pager about
Henry...
Votes So Far: 1The 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...
Votes So Far: 1Nena's Math Force (2005)
Susan Jarema
This picture book for children, which is available for free online and also in print, tells the story of a girl who is upset when her math teacher requires the class to do arithmetic without a calculator....
Votes So Far: 1Newton's Gift (1979)
Paul J. Nahin
Time traveller Wallace John Steinhope believes that he will be able to help
his hero, Isaac Newton, avoid the tedium of computation by bringing him an electronic
calculator that can do simple arithmetic....
Votes So Far: 1Newton's Hooke (2004)
David Pinner
A play about Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke which presents "the dark side" of Newton. Emphasis is put on his egotism (not only does he think that he is incomparably brilliant, but he also seems to think...
Votes So Far: 1The Next Dimension (1947)
Vladimir Karapetoff
"A Mathematical Play in Five Dialogs". Once again, we are treated to the
Flatland notion of two-dimensional creatures
pondering a "hypothetical" three dimensional existence. Many of the usual
concerns...
Votes So Far: 1The Non-Statistical Man (1956)
Raymond F. Jones
In this short story, insurance adjuster Charles Bascomb comes up against his greatest enemy: intuition. The story presents mathematics (especially statistics and logic) as one way man can deal with reality....
Votes So Far: 1Numberland (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,...
Votes So Far: 1Numbers 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...
Votes So Far: 1Nuremberg Joys (2000)
Charles Sheffield
A mathematician is on trial for war crimes, regarding
his role in developing an absolutely horrendous killing
weapon based on sophisticated new physics. Guilt or
...
Votes So Far: 1The Object (2005)
Alex Kasman
This is a mathematical horror story, written by someone who doesn't like horror stories. Since I'm the author, I can honestly (and humbly) admit that the result is kind of weird.
The plot concerns...
Votes So Far: 1Odile (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....
Votes So Far: 1Of Mystery There Is No End (2002)
Leonard Michaels
Leonard Michaels' recurring character of UCLA mathematician Nachman faces questions of infidelity when he learns of the extra-marital affairs of his friend Norbert and Norbert's wife.
It is somewhat...
Votes So Far: 1An Old Arithmetician (1885)
Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
The title character of this short story, which appeared in the September 1885 issue of Harper's Weekly, is an old, uneducated woman who loves computing (with chalk and slate):
You have always been very...
Votes So Far: 1On the marriage of Hermes and Philology (410)
Marianus Capella
"A must in your data base is Martianus Capella (c. 410 A.D.), On the
marriage of Hermes and Philology (translated in english by W.H. Stahl,
Columbia University Press): Hermes is marrying a minor godess
Philology. The Seven Liberal Arts (including Arithmetic, Geometry,
Astronomy and Harmony) come to greet the couple and present themselves."
Votes So Far: 1On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction (2003)
Karl Iagnemma
The title of the story was the title of a chapter in the Ph.D. thesis that Joseph, the main character, was working on...but never finished. Instead, he wound up living with his advisor's daughter, working...
Votes So Far: 1Orpheus 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. ...
Votes So Far: 1The Pacific Mystery (2006)
Stephen Baxter
This starts as an alternate history short story, in which Lord Halifax became Prime Minister of England in 1940 and reaches an accommodation with Germany; Germany holds sway over Europe and Russia, Japan...
Votes So Far: 1Panda 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...
Votes So Far: 1The Penultimate Conjecture (1999)
Leonard Michaels
This is the most mathematical of Leonard Michaels' seven stories about the brilliant but anti-social UCLA mathematician, Nachman. In it, Nachman attends a conference in San Francisco at which a Swedish...
Votes So Far: 1The Phantom of Kansas (1976)
John Varley
A sublunar meteorological artist wakens from her memory
recording to learn that a serial killer has been murdering
her repeatedly, and is presumably still...
Votes So Far: 1The Planck Dive (1998)
Greg Egan
This short story describes a bizarre experiment in which researchers are cloned (quantum cloning, not the genetic kind; these researchers aren't "fleshers") and sent into a black hole. Their goal is to...
Votes So Far: 1The 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...
Votes So Far: 1The Power of Words (1845)
Edgar Allan Poe
A very short work (two-pages long!) in
which two angels discuss the divine implications of our ability to
mathematically determine the future consequences of an action, especially
wave propagation....
Votes So Far: 1Powerball 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...
Votes So Far: 1Probabilities (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...
Votes So Far: 1Professor and Colonel (1987)
Ruth Berman
In this unusual story, we get to see another side to Sherlock Holmes' arch enemy, the brilliant but evil mathematician Professor Moriarty. Here, rather than perpetrating a crime, Moriarty is merely visiting with his brother, discussing the significance of his research into asteroid dynamics. (See also Asimov's take on this same subject.)
Votes So Far: 1Progress (2005)
Alex Kasman
The mathematics of ancient Egypt can look very strange to us today. For example, although they did not have many fractions, they did know about the number 2/3. Strangely, however, it took a page of computation...
Votes So Far: 1Properties 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,...
Votes So Far: 1Pythagoras's Darkest Hour (2007)
Colin Adams
A humorous short story from the author of Mathematically Bent which tells the true story of the discovery of the Pythagorean Theorem. Well, actually, perhaps it isn't exactly true...but it is so good,...
Votes So Far: 1Q.E.D. (1984)
Bruce Stanley Burdick
The "Q.E.D." from the title of this short story published in Analog
(volume 104 #12, December 1984, pp. 96-112) is the latin expression "quod
erat demonstratum" that is meant to conclude a proof and...
Votes So Far: 1Quanto scommettiamo ("How much do you want to bet?") (1965)
Italo Calvino
The story is about two beings, living since the beginning of the universe (one of them, the protagonist of the book, is "old Qfwfq" - it's not a misprint -, a mysterious being that claims to have witnessed...
Votes So Far: 1The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes (1895)
Herbert George Wells
Rather than seeing what is actually around him in England, Davidson sees
events occurring on a rock off of the Antipodes Island. The explanation
offered includes the notion of non-flat geometries for space.
Votes So Far: 1Resolution (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...
Votes So Far: 1Ripples in the Dirac Sea (1988)
Geoffrey A. Landis
A time machine story based on a combination of Hilbert's Hotel analogy and the "Fermi Sea". We read of the travels of the main character to the ancient past, to the San Francisco earthquake and to the...
Votes So Far: 1River 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...
Votes So Far: 1The 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...
Votes So Far: 1The 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.
Votes So Far: 1Sad 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...
Votes So Far: 1The 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...
Votes So Far: 1The 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.
Votes So Far: 1The 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...
Votes So Far: 1Shakespeare Predicted it All (2003)
Dietmar Dath
An artistically composed piece about Georg Cantor, inventor of the theory of transfinite cardinals, in the form of a dialogue between the characters "1" and "2", both of whom are either Cantor or Hamlet....
Votes So Far: 1Shooting 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...
Votes So Far: 1The Simpsons: Girls Just Want to Have Sums (2006)
Matt Selman
In this episode from the 17th season of the hit cartoon The Simpsons, the principal of Bart and Lisa's school makes a sexist comment (clearly a reference to the controversial comments from Harvard President...
Votes So Far: 1Singleton (2002)
Greg Egan
This story involves a physicist and a mathematician who have a child -- well, sort of -- that they have specially designed to remain in a "classical" state (as opposed to a quantum superposition of states)...
Votes So Far: 1Six Thought Experiments Concerning the Nature of Computation (2005)
Rudy Rucker
These are six very short stories, a few of which have mathematical themes.
In the first story, Lucky Number, a game programmer spots some "lucky numbers" spray painted on a train. On a whim, he uses...
Votes So Far: 1A Slight Miscalculation (1971)
Ben Bova
This is a story of a mathematician who found a way to predict
earthquakes. He finds out that there will be a major earthquake
in California (where he lives). After checking this prediction
using CalTech's...
Votes So Far: 1Spaceland (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...
Votes So Far: 1Spying 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...
Votes So Far: 1Stamping 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...
Votes So Far: 1The Star (1897)
Herbert George Wells
Although some of the science is a bit off -- for example, the idea that the
rotation of planets has something to do with their ability to orbit the sun
or that the "star" formed by the collision of Neptune...
Votes So Far: 1The 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...
Votes So Far: 1Starman 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...
Votes So Far: 1Sticks (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...
Votes So Far: 1Still 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...
Votes So Far: 1The Strange Case of Mr. Jean D. (1983)
Joao Filipe Queiro
Published in the Mathematical Intelligencer magazine (Math.Intell. 5, 3 78-90 (1983)) this is the story of a mathematician who has a nightmare: Pi is rational! (Thanks to Nuno Crato for the suggestion.)
Votes So Far: 1Stranger than Fiction (2006)
Marc Forster (Director) /
Zach Helm (Screenplay)
An employee of the IRS who is obsessed with counting and performing mental computations begins to hear the voice of a woman narrating his life. He soon learns that he is a character in a novel and that...
Votes So Far: 1Summer Solstice (1985)
Charles Leonard Harness
I did enjoy reading this short story (nominated for a Nebula award in 1985)
in which the famous Greek mathematician Eratosthenes determines the Earth's
circumference and meets a shipwrecked alien, but...
Votes So Far: 1The Symbolic Logic of Murder (1960)
John Reese
Through a combination of biblical mnemonics and Boolean algebra, our
heroes are able to solve a mysterious murder. Appears in Mathematical Magpie.
Votes So Far: 1Szatan 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...
Votes So Far: 1Ten (1986)
Isaac Asimov
We might argue that the particular words and symbols we use to express
mathematical concepts are not as important as the concepts themselves...and
mathematically that may well be the case. However,...
Votes So Far: 1Thomas 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...
Votes So Far: 1Those Who Can, Do (1965)
Bob Kurosaka
In this short-short classic, a mathematics professor ends the first day
of a Differential Equations class asking for questions. One student is
irksome, even peculiar, in his wish to know what practical...
Votes So Far: 1Three Cornered Wheel (1963)
Poul Anderson
Sometimes a surprising mathematical fact will inspire a science fiction story to illustrate it. I suspect that is what happened with this story that comes up with a contrived circumstance in which the...
Votes So Far: 1Threshold (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...
Votes So Far: 1Through the Gates of the Silver Key (1934)
H.P. Lovecraft / E. Hoffmann Price
"We read of the fantastic travels of the dreamer and mystic Randolph Carter as he
arrives at the Ultimate Gate separating the parallel dimensions and alternate
realities
of the Universe. The Gate...
Votes So Far: 1The 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....
Votes So Far: 1To 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...
Votes So Far: 1The Tolman Trick (2006)
Manil Suri
Professor Tolman attends a conference at the Mathematics Institute at Oberwolfach, but a young colleague suspects that the result he is presenting may not be correct. Published in the first issue of Subtropics,...
Votes So Far: 1Topsy-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...
Votes So Far: 1Touching Centauri (2003)
Stephen Baxter
A mathematician solves Fermi's paradox, and then actually
*does* something about it, with immense consequences.
Originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction August 2003. Republished in the Baxter compilation "Phase Space".
Votes So Far: 1Towel Season (1998)
Ron Carlson
A mathematician and his wife try to fit in with their suburban
neighbors. Perhaps the best description of the feel of what doing
mathematical research is really like. Much of the tension of the...
Votes So Far: 1The Tower of Babylon (2002)
Ted Chiang
There really is almost no mathematics in this bizarre story that hauntingly
combines
religion with science fiction. However, the "punchline" is entirely
topological in nature.
This story can be found in the collection Stories
of Your Life and Others which contains other Chiang stories orbiting the
central themes of mathematics, religion and science.
Votes So Far: 1Train Brains / The Runaway Train (Donald Duck) (1956)
Carl Barks
Donald Duck's nephews -- Huey, Dewey and Louie -- are trying to earn a merit badge in engineering for the Junior Woodchucks by working out a complicated problem involving toy trains.
"We'll never be...
Votes So Far: 1Transition Dreams (1993)
Greg Egan
Transition dreams, an old man learns in this story, are dreams that your new, robotic brain has as it is being "filled up" with the patterns copied from your old, organic brain. There is a good deal of...
Votes So Far: 1Tre per zero (1997)
T. Sclavi (writer) / B. Brindisi (artist)
An Italian comic book whose title translates as "Three Times Zero".
A very surreal story where a (stereotypical but non-trivial) mathematician "discovers" that
three times zero equal three, and we...
Votes So Far: 1A 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...
Votes So Far: 1Trouble 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...
Votes So Far: 1Twisters (1988)
Paul J. Nahin
A medical doctor stumbles onto a dangerous trap in this short story which
was published in Analog (Vol CVIII No 6, May 1988). The twisted
donuts sold by the new shop he passes on the way to work turn out to be
Klein bottles (a topological oddity like the Mobius strip).
Votes So Far: 1Two 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...
Votes So Far: 1Two Trains Running (1990)
August Wilson
This play is set in Pittsburgh, 1969. An economically depressed area
of the city is facing urban renewal, and the specter of eminent domain
seizure hangs over the main character's future. The other...
Votes So Far: 1Uncle Georg's Attic (2002)
Ben Schumacher
This short story appeared in the September 2002 issue of "Math Horizons",
published by the Mathematical Association of America. In it, some kids
look through an attic containing lots of stuff belonging...
Votes So Far: 1Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies (1992)
Greg Egan
"Originally published in Interzone #61, July 1992. Because of an accident,
people's values and beliefs, and convictions, became completely permeable
to one another. So people start clumping according...
Votes So Far: 1Vault of the Beast (1940)
Alfred Elton van Vogt
"A creature of vast powers is locked up inside a vault made up of
ultimate metal. The key to freeing it turns out to be 'factoring
the ultimate prime number', which procedure is given an extended
pseudomathematical...
Votes So Far: 1Watt (1953)
Samuel Beckett
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
...
Votes So Far: 1The Witch of Agnesi (2006)
Robert Spiller
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...
Votes So Far: 1The Wonderful Visit (1895)
Herbert George Wells
"An angel, who normally inhabits a fourth dimensional world (with curvature instead of gravitation!) falls into our three dimensional world."
Votes So Far: 1The Writing on the Wall (2005)
Steve Stanton
When he was eight years old, David was visited by an image of his future self, causing him to write mathematical formulas on the wall. (Unfortunately, his parents paint over it before he has a chance...
Votes So Far: 1The Year of the Tiger (1996)
Jack Higgins
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...
Votes So Far: 1The Zero Clue (1952)
Rex Stout
Nero Wolfe can't stand Leo Heller, a mathematician who uses operations research to solve mysteries and seems to be superseding Wolfe's own reputation. But then Heller is murdered by one of his clients....
Votes So Far: 1A. Botts and the Moebius Strip (1945)
William Hazlett Upson
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...
Votes So Far: 2Adventure of the Final Problem (1893)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
This first Sherlock Holmes story about Professor Moriarty (later to be
viewed as Holmes' arch enemy) introduces him as a professor of
mathematics who won fame as a young man for his extension of the
binomial...
Votes So Far: 2The Adventures of Topology Man (2005)
Alex Kasman
Parody is easy....topology is hard!
In this short story, I made use of (and made fun of) the classic superhero comic book genre to illustrate some ideas from topology. So, we end up seeing a battle...
Votes So Far: 2The 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...
Votes So Far: 2And 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...
Votes So Far: 2Art Thou Mathematics? (1978)
Charles Mobbs
Short story (Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, October 1978 Vol. 98 No 10) concerning the very nature of mathematical discovery. It was later rewritten in the form of a play, which the author has...
Votes So Far: 2Artifact (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...
Votes So Far: 2The 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...
Votes So Far: 2The Balloon Hoax (1844)
Edgar Allan Poe
This is Poe's account of an alleged balloon trip to the
moon, in the spirit of the then infamous moon hoax. The
balloon rider describes the Earth as appearing concave when
5 miles up. Later,...
Votes So Far: 2The Bank (2001)
Robert Connolly
A brilliant young mathematician (aren't they all!) uses chaos theory to develop a mathematical model that predicts the stock market in this Australian thriller (co-produced by Axiom Films) .
I love...
Votes So Far: 2Been a long, long time (1970)
R. A. Lafferty
It's a very well-written humorous tale (as expected if you're familiar with Lafferty). The mathematical content is a literal interpretation of the six typing monkeys. The angel Boshel, as a punishment,...
Votes So Far: 2Big Numbers (1990)
Alan Moore / Bill Sienkiewicz
This comic book (written by Moore and illustrated by Sienkiewicz) was planned as a 12 issue series with a mathematics theme. Unfortunately, due to a lack of cooperation by the artist (and also a substitute...
Votes So Far: 2The Bird with the Broken Wing (1930)
Agatha Christie
The Harley Quin stories (this collection, plus two later stories) are amongst the most peculiar mysteries ever written. (They certainly are Dame Agatha's most peculiar. They were also her personal...
Votes So Far: 2The 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...
Votes So Far: 2The Book of Sand (1975)
Jorge Luis Borges
"The line is made up of an infinite number of points;
the plane of an infinite number of lines;
the volume of an infinite number of planes;
the hypervolume of an infinite number of volumes.
....
Votes So Far: 2Border Guards (1999)
Greg Egan
In a virtual universe shaped like a 3-torus, free from disease and death, Jamil is easily depressed but enjoys playing a game of quantum soccer with his old friends, and one new friend. The new friend...
Votes So Far: 2Brain 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...
Votes So Far: 2The 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...
Votes So Far: 2The Captured Cross-Section (1929)
Miles J. Breuer (M.D.)
Another "extra dimensions" story, with the twist of our hero having to save his fiance (also a mathematician) from terrifying dangers. There is some nonsense at the beginning about rotations and a count of variables/equations that probably had its basis in a reasonable linear algebra class but just comes out sounding kind of silly here.
Votes So Far: 2Cascade 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...
Votes So Far: 2Case 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...
Votes So Far: 2The Catalyst (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...
Votes So Far: 2Code 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...
Votes So Far: 2Confusions 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...
Votes So Far: 2Conjure Wife (Dark Ladies) (1953)
Fritz Leiber
Norman Saylor, a professor of anthropology/sociology, discovers his wife has been practicing magic for years, and that their
house is loaded with charms. Annoyed at her secret superstitious bent, he...
Votes So Far: 2Conversations on Mathematics with a Visitor from Outer Space (1998)
David Ruelle
As the title implies, this is a description of (presumably
fictional) discussions that the author had with an alien about
mathematics and, in particular, the way that Earth mathematics
differs from...
Votes So Far: 2The 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...
Votes So Far: 2Dark 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...
Votes So Far: 2Diary 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...
Votes So Far: 2The 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.
I have not yet read this book,...
Votes So Far: 2The 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...
Votes So Far: 2D'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.
Votes So Far: 2The 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...
Votes So Far: 2The Exception (2005)
Alex Kasman
Written in the form of a dialogue between a man in a nursing home and his grandchild, this short story describes an undergraduate research project that produces a surprising answer to one of the most famous...
Votes So Far: 2Eye of the Beholder (2005)
Alex Kasman
Shortly after a stunning success in her research, personal tragedy forces a math professor to change careers and begin work at the NSA where her work on cryptography involves some difficult ethical decisions....
Votes So Far: 2The 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...
Votes So Far: 2The 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...
Votes So Far: 2Für immer in Honig (Forever in Honey) (2005)
Dietmar Dath
Site visitor Hauke Reddman 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...
Votes So Far: 2Gödel's Doom (1985)
George Zebrowski
What if Gödel was wrong? That is the question asked in this well
written but very confused short story. The characters in this story
decide to test Gödel's theorem by running a computer
program to...
Votes So Far: 2Gambler'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,...
Votes So Far: 2The 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...
Votes So Far: 2The 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...
Votes So Far: 2Go, Little Book (1972)
Isaac Asimov
Combinatorics is used to break a "matchbook code".
One of the "Black Widower" mysteries written for Ellery Queen magazine.
See also these [2, 3] other BW stories.
Votes So Far: 2Hapgood (1988)
Tom Stoppard
A brief discussion of Euler's solution to the Königsburg Bridge Problem appears in Stoppard's play about espionage and quantum physics.
When a British physicist double-agent is accused of giving...
Votes So Far: 2Herr Doctor's Wondrous Smile (1998)
Vladimir Tasic
In this short story, a logician who really does not take the superstitions
of numerology seriously is invited to a "fringe" conference where he
delivers a talk on the mystical implications of Gregory...
Votes So Far: 2The 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...
Votes So Far: 2I of Newton (1970)
Joe Haldeman
In this short story a mathematics professor accidentally summons a demon
by cursing while working on a problem involving integration. The devil
brags
that he is able to disprove Fermat's last theorem,...
Votes So Far: 2The Ingenious Mr. Spinola (1924)
Ernest Bramah
Max Carrados is a blind amateur detective genius, quite popular in the early 20th century, but mostly forgotten since then. (Such is also the fate of E.B.'s Kai Lung fantasy stories.)
...
Votes So Far: 2Inherit 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."
Votes So Far: 2Into Darkness (1992)
Greg Egan
Creepy story about a man who volunteers to rescue people from a
worm-hole that randomly appears in cities, killing anyone who is not
able to make it to the center of the spacetime-distortion before it
disappears....
Votes So Far: 2The Investigation (1959)
Stanislaw Lem
In investigating a bizarre case of missing -- and apparently resurrected bodies -- an investigator at Scotland Yard consult