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Ask Slashdot: Mathematical Fiction?
An anonymous reader writes "Neal Stephenson's 1999 Cryptonomicon was a great yarn. It was also a thoroughly enjoyable (and too short) romp through some mathematics. Where can I find more of that? I should say that I don't want SF — at least none of the classic SF I read voraciously in the 70s; it's just not the same thing, and far too often just a puppet-theatre for an author's philosophical rant. Has any author managed to hit the same vein as Stephenson did? (Good non-fiction math-reads are also gratefully accepted. What have you got?)"
After all, 2+2=5
http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/
It's great mathematical fiction.
When talking length, we're not always talking about page count.
Try something by Greg Egan. His short story Glory (pdf) is online.
flatland, a romance of many dimensions;
(http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~banchoff/Flatland/)
I found Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach" to be at least as engaging as any Stephenson-esque fiction I've ever read.
Well over a hundred years old and well ahead of it's time.
The Story of O by Pauline Reage is the fascinating account of the discovery of the number in ancient Mesopotamia.
...Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer winner -reads- like good fiction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
In terms of "dramatizing math", I'd have to give it the nod even over Cryptonomicon.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
"A Subway Named Mobius", from 1950.
Godel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofsteder
The Mind's I, co-edited by Douglas Hofsteder and Daniel Dennett
One, Two, Three... Infinity by George Gamow
Flatland, by Edwin Abbott Abbott (okay, this one is fiction)
anything by Martin Gardner
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
I thought you wanted fictional mathematics and was going to point you to arXiv.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Captured my attention when I was in high school and I re-read it every few years. It was the first SF that I had ever read that made mathematics a central part of its story.
While not often directly mathematical, several of Jorge Luis Borges's short stories are interesting efforts on his part to grapple philosophically with many of the concepts of infinity: The Library of Babel most famously, but also great stories like The Book of Sand, The Aleph, and even Death and the Compass. They won't necessarily tickle you in the same way that Stephenson's work did, but they're still a fine jumping-off point into fascinating and deeply philosophical mathematics.
I can't believe nobody here has posted this yet...
One of the most underrated books ever written is Alice in Wonderland. No, it's not "just" an absurdist children's tale. The author, "Lewis Carroll," was really the mathematician and logician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson -- and some mathematicians claim that almost everything that happens in the book is an allegory of a mathematical theorem or algorithm of some kind. I'm not qualified to say, but it is a marvelous work, and some people have written mathematical footnotes for it.
For mathematical fiction, I've found nothing beats macroeconomics textbooks.
I read a story the premise of which involved a computer that was designed to create/discover new mathematical theorems. At some point there was found to be an issue in some areas of research, and it was ultimately concluded that another similar effort was being made elsewhere in the universe, and the two efforts were at odds. Essentially the math became 'true' instantly/everywhere when it was first proven, but with different starting points/assumptions the two mathematical realms were in conflict. Don't remember the name/author, and I would love to know (assuming anyone recognizes it from my poor description) to reread and recommend.
Difference Engine sucked at every possible level.
You may like 50 shades of Grey, it has the number 50 on it.
I took a number out of the Romney/Ryan economic recovery plan, and multiplied it by itself to see what would happen. I got a negative number. Why would that be?
I took another number and multiplied it by itself, and got another negative number. In fact, every number I took from that plan and multiplied by itself, I got a negative number!
How could that be?
. . . economic recovery will occur, but only in other dimensions that most folks won't be able to sense and experience.
And since Superstring is the Unified Theory, it applies to both political parties.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Read the Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy for hilarious, ingenious, quantum physics-based fiction.
Here's an excellent source of mathematical fiction... Alex Kasman's curated list of mathematical fiction! I highly recommend it.
Also, a story I discovered through this list, which was truly spectacular: Ted Chiang's "Division by Zero". Freely available here.
I just took the actual Obama recovery results and got negative numbers without having to multiply by anything...
I think Stephenson takes an eternal and unjust beating about his endings. His books end when the major conflicts are in a position to be resolved by a thinking reader. There's no "and they lived happily ever after," but there is always a sense that all of the key pieces are in the right place and the outcome is decided in that the people we want to come out on top will come out on top. Chess is a very apt metaphor, in my mind: when he stops writing, you know that the Bad Guys are outmaneuvered and trapped in a corner. Does he really need, considering that he tends to be free with his words as it is, to write another thirty pages in order to gift-wrap a final outcome that is already easily imagined by an engaged reader?
Don't get me wrong; I appreciate books that have those kinds of endings. But Stephenson is more concerned with the interesting conflicts, the multiple disparate threads that weave and tangle with each other. When the massive knot becomes a loose collection of simply-twisted loops, he loses interest. I don't find that to be a fatal flaw at all, and I respect that he wants to devote all of his energy to the engaging events leading up to the point where a resolution is inevitable instead of spending a lot of time on the resolution itself.
Take The Diamond Age, for instance, the ending of which a sibling comment laments. (Spoilers follow.) We end with Nell essentially leading an army of girls who are ready to take on the status quo, and with the decentralized Seed in a position to overtake the top-down economics of the Feed. The implication is that these two things, both on their own and taken together, are forces that can and will reshape the world they inhabit. To me, in a way, it's like politics: as soon as you start to get into the details of the resolution, you're going to alienate people who think it should have taken a different path.
Your brain is not a computer.
Not quite what you're asking for, but there a whole range of comics to help vulgarise maths that are a great read. Look for the work of Ian Stewart. He was quite successful in France with French translations, but I'm not sure whether he galvanised much interest in the English speaking world. His famous series in French goes by the title of "les chroniques de Rose Polymath".
http://www.amazon.com/Ian-Stewart/e/B000APQ9NM/.
On a slightly different note, French astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Petit vulgarised a number of physics theories in an entertaining way. And what's more he has now provided free download of the scans of a lot of his comics: http://www.savoir-sans-frontieres.com/JPP/telechargeables/free_downloads.htm#english.
Or read the same in many other languages, take your pick: http://www.savoir-sans-frontieres.com/.
If we drop the fiction requirement but still avoid math proper, there are classics like...
"A Mathematicians Apology" by G.H. Hardy is The description of what it is to be a modern mathematician. Essential reading for the professional.
"Chaos: Making a New Science" by James Gleick popularized the field of chaos, now folded into analysis.
"The Fractal Geometry of Nature" by B. Mandelbrot is worth it for the images, and popularized fractal geometry.
"Godel, Escher, Bach" by D. Hofstadter has been mentioned above, but is an extraordinary exploration of logic and well-deserves its awards.
I consider "Where Mathematics Comes From" by G. Lakoff and R. Nunez to rank amoung these. It applies linguistic cognitive neuroscience methods to explore the neurological basis of mathematics.
For math proper, a couple favorites:
"The Heritage of Thales" by Anglin and Lambek is part history and part math textbook, presenting classic results from different periods of history in their context.
"A Wavelet Tour of signal processing" by Stephane Mallat is the best book on wavelets I've seen, clearly written and full of powerful ideas which may take centuries to unfold.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
Anathem is one of the best books I've read in years, and if the opening chapters don't grip you you're missing something badly. Having said that, most of Anathem's jokes are based on a strong knowledge of etymology and of the history of western (especially Greek) philosophy, so if you're not strong on those subjects a lot of it will go WHOOOOOSH over your head. But, that's just the same as most of Cryptonomicon's jokes requiring a knowledge of mathematics. Stephenson expects his readers to be well and widely read and to have an intelligent understanding of what they've read; he's not 'easy reading'.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
This is a near-miss in the math nonfiction category, "One Jump Ahead" by Jonathan Schaeffer is the story of the guy who solved the game of checkers. I haven't read the book, but there's a podcast on the "relatively prime" series, called "Chinook", here.
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with either the Relatively Prime podcast series, or the Chinook project.
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