Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Ask Slashdot: Mathematical Fiction?

Posted by Soulskill on from the it-was-an-arbitrarily-lit-and-stormy-night dept.

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?)"

8 of 278 comments (clear)

  1. Tons of math fiction by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  2. Greg Egan by Edward+Coffin · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    1. Re:Greg Egan by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  3. flatland by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  4. Hofstadter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Hofstadter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  5. The Story of O by Anne_Nonymous · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  6. on the non-fiction side by new+death+barbie · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.