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?)"

Comments

George Orwell

[Anonymous Coward]

After all, 2+2=5

Tons of math fiction

[Anonymous Coward]

http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/

Romney's Budget

[Anonymous Coward]

It's great mathematical fiction.

Re:Romney's Budget

[Anonymous Coward]

you partisan bitches

Wow! Projection.

Re:Romney's Budget

[JWW]

Obama's budget is a fairy tale with magical creatures called "taxes on the rich" which make everything better.

Greg Egan

[Edward Coffin]

Try something by Greg Egan. His short story Glory (pdf) is online.

Re:Greg Egan

[Anonymous Coward]

Egan's latest, "Clockwork Rocket", is probably his most mathy work to date. It takes place in a different universe (dubbed "Orthogonal") with its own distinct physics: the speed of light is different for different colors; gravity is an inverse-linear force as opposed to inverse-square; and don't even ask what's going on at the subatomic level (are there even atoms in this universe? It's not quite clear this early in the trilogy...)

Anyway, the book's got diagrams and everything, so if math and physics are your thing, you'll have lots of fun with this one.

Re:Greg Egan

[Beetle B.]

I second Greg Egan. For a taste, here's a free short story.

flatland

[Anonymous Coward]

flatland, a romance of many dimensions;
(http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~banchoff/Flatland/)

Re:flatland

[Anonymous Coward]

The sequel "Flatterland" (by Ian Stewart, who also wrote "The Annotated Flatland", which is exactly what it says on the tin, and contributed to the excellent "Science of Discworld" trilogy) and parallel novel "The Planiverse" (by A. K. Dewdney) are also quite good.

Flatterland covers a lot of advanced math and physics, via the adventures of A. Square's great-granddaughter Victoria Line, while The Planiverse examines what physics, chemistry, biology, and societies would be like in a two-dimensional universe.

Re:flatland

[ClickOnThis]

flatland, a romance of many dimensions;
(http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~banchoff/Flatland/)

Yes, recommended. I enjoyed it, although one has to look past the misogyny in its pages. (It was written in 1884.)

I also recommend the 1965 novel Sphereland for those who would enjoy a sequel with a more non-Euclidian treatment.

Hofstadter

[Anonymous Coward]

I found Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach" to be at least as engaging as any Stephenson-esque fiction I've ever read.

Re:Hofstadter

[Anonymous Coward]

Hostadter also wrote "Metamagical Themas" - both the book and the articles in Scientific American for some time. Those two books were some of the best reads I've ever enjoyed.

The Story of O

[Anne_Nonymous]

The Story of O by Pauline Reage is the fascinating account of the discovery of the number in ancient Mesopotamia.

Not fiction but...

[Empiric]

...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.

"A Subway Named Mobius"

[Animats]

"A Subway Named Mobius", from 1950.

on the non-fiction side

[new death barbie]

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

Oh, you want mathematical _fiction_

[John Hasler]

I thought you wanted fictional mathematics and was going to point you to arXiv.

The greatest one of all

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The greatest one of all

[Antipater]

It's an interesting read despite its now-defeated viewpoint, kind of like watching The Battleship Potemkin or Triumph of the Will. It was an allegory ranting against the discipline of complex math, which had just recently been introduced. He was ridiculing the concept of imaginary numbers, which take you to a Wonderland where things grow and shrink in size randomly and other things disappear almost entirely (except their grin!).

Re:The greatest one of all

[Artifakt]

It's very, very much there, to the point where it surprises me when people don't spot it, but perhaps it helps to know the context:
Dodgson also wrote a book called Euclid and His Modern Rivals, which was basically a lengthy criticism of people who were trying to develop alternative axioms of geometry and new theorems from them in Dodgson's day. It's fictionalized, in that he used Minos and Radamanthus, two of the three judges of Hades, he had the ghosts of famous dead mathematicians appear, and he actually used Lewis Carroll as a character, who chimed in with his opinions as though he weren't merely Dodgson's alter-ego.
        By most accounts, it's a fair lynching. Except for Legendre and Peirce, the people Dodgson was criticising have been pretty well dismissed and are not considered at all relevant to modern non-Euclidian math. Dodgson wasn't particularly critical of those two. For example, he basically said Henrici was using a cheat called a Magician's Force" to present his arguments, which is pretty much saying Henrici wasn't just wrong but crooked. He granted that one of Henrici's arguments was probably intended to be a Reducto ad Absurdum, but then called it an abnormal and hideous one. In a genteel era, there are places where he's about as blunt with some remarks as could be, without shocking genteel folk, and probably if he had been speaking about businessmen or military figures, instead of mathematicians, would have provoked a real challenge to a duel or two, even though they were firmly illegal by then (about 1865 when the first snippets of it were published seperately, to 1885 for the whole volume). About the worst he said of Legendre was that he was better suited to readers who had already studied the subject in depth, and beginners would be confused by their own prejudices as to what words mean in common language instead of math.
            I hope you can see where this is going, a bit. In the Alice books, we have a character saying when he uses a word it means precisely what he wants, people having to run as hard as they can just to stay in place, arguments about logical order (The Red Queen's "First the sentence, then the verdict"), and all sorts of bits which are not only about math, but are said by characters who are parodies of some of the specific mathematicians in 'Euclid and'. There's reasons why some characters in the two Alice books look like walruses and carpenters if you look at photos and illustrations of the people in 'Euclid and' who say the quaintly illogical things that match.

The second printing of this book came out in 1974, from Dover, and people might still be able to dig it up cheap. It's 'slightly dry reading' by modern standards.

 

Easy

[DHalcyon]

For mathematical fiction, I've found nothing beats macroeconomics textbooks.

I think

[M0j0_j0j0]

You may like 50 shades of Grey, it has the number 50 on it.

Re:Oo oo! I've got one!

[Oh Gawwd Peak Oil]

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?

Re:Trying to remember

[mdenham]

That would be "Luminous", by... hey, Greg Egan again. Good story, if kind of short.

If you want to stick in that general direction of things, BTW, the short story collection Dark Integers and Other Stories has that plus four other more or less loosely-related (I believe only one actually qualifies as a sequel to Luminous) stories. Probably your best bet for sticking to math-related fiction.

Funny you should ask...

[EPAstor]

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.

Re:Oo oo! I've got one!

[DiegoBravo]

I just took the actual Obama recovery results and got negative numbers without having to multiply by anything...

Re:Too short?

[Simon Brooke]

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'.