Consulting for "A Beautiful Mind" was in part an exercise in mathematical fiction. The later math is imagined to fit the story. John Nash even wrote me to ask what the math on the clipboard meant, as his film self recovered on a porch.
In various venues, I explained that mathematicians don't have a lot of experience writing fiction. Other than grant proposals...
John Nash saw the symbol pi as just a Greek letter. In grad school he proudly used every Greek letter in a paper. I was asked to decorate his (film) dorm window in grease pencil, and by chance a photograph of Russell Crowe through this window became one of the most widely distributed promo stills. He's looking intent behind the equation "0 < pi < 1", straight from Nash's paper.
The reaction in my community, which I quite enjoyed, would disabuse anyone of the idea that mathematicians are less cripplingly conventional than other people. To the majority of mathematicians, pi is tied to the circle. A great UC Berkeley email thread speculated that I was trying to make Russell Crowe look like a fool.
For Japanese readers, I have been following "Hamamura Nagisa no Keisan Nooto" (Hamamura Nagisa's Calculation Notes), which is a light novel mystery series. Most chapters contain some crime by a math-minded terrorist, and the solutions to the mysteries always involve math. It covers a wide range of topics from simple fractions to Fermat's Last Theorem. It's a wonderful series for people who like math.
Nice. The mathematical connection to some of these is pretty thin.
I'd add:
Jeffrey Kegler, The God Proof (novel about a lost manuscript of Kurt Gödel)
Norbert Wiener, The Tempter (novel about a patent troll math professor)
Martin Gardner, The Magic Numbers of Dr Matrix (other Martin Gardner books are there)
George Gamow, Mr. Tomkins in Wonderland (didactic about special relativity, there is other physics stuff on the list so why not)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle -- I haven't read this but I think it had a mathematician character
P. J. Plauger, Wet Blanket -- part of "Fighting Madness" series, about a physicst making universe-changing discoveries. The author is also a noted software developer who co-wrote at least two books with Brian Kernighan.
Maybe a bit out there, but Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, not mathematical per se but has mathematical asides, and is informed by statistics and game theory.
I went looking for Rudy Rucker on this list, and am satisfied. He's wild, highly recommend. Enjoy some merge with someone: "the drug "merge" is a key element in the novel "Wetware". Merge is a drug that causes users to soften into a puddle, experience oneness with the universe, and fuse conscious entities. "
This is a really cool list, if not a little impenetrable if you aren't familiar with an artists work — does anyone have a work that they would recommend, in particular a novel?
That's always my problem with these huge lists. I feel like any recommendation is so much more useful if it's accompanied by at least a bit of context about why it's being recommended. Whenever I ask for recommendations on reddit or elsewhere, I prefer 2 or 3 answers with information over one of the 20 item list dumps. This site does actually have some snippets of context, you just have to basically click on one (I guess at random) to get to them. Some categorization or other discovery feature might help greatly I think.
Anyway, I will second the other reply's recommendation of Borges also with the caveat that he didn't write novels. His short stories are phenomenal. They are also a bit more philosophical than "mathematical", but some of them (like The Library of Babylon) deal a bit with the intersection of mathematical ideas (combinatorics and infinity in that one's case) with the way that playing with them would impact people and society.
The best advice for reading him would be, assuming you are reading in English, to pick up Penguin's Collected Fictions edition, containing a good translation of a lot of his short stories (and poetry as well). Skip past the first collection of short stories ("A Universal History of Iniquity") as it's pretty good but not his best. Start with the collection called "Fictions". Its first story is Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which gives you a good taste of how he writes.
I would suggest Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture - I read it many many years ago, and not only found it very entertaining, it also ultimately sparked my interest in mathematical research :)
Not in this list, but I feel Dante deserves an honorable mention for his inclusion of an explanation of the hypersphere (3-sphere) in the Divine Comedy.
I remember way back when (like about 50 or so years ago) about a crew of maths guys flying a ship through something like tensor space - an actualisation of maths. I cannot for the life of me (or google) remember what it was called or who it was by. Might be on that web page, but too difficult to navigate for me!
Mathematical fiction is tough, because of the problems with "mathematical counterfactuals". Why not go with mathematical poetry instead? There are nice sections of same in the Clifton Fadiman anthologies. The first of these is also from The Space Child's Mother Goose. (All from memory, so please pardon any errors.)
---------------
Three jolly sailors from Blandon-on-Tyne
Went to sea in a bottle by Klein
They found the view exceedingly dull
For the sea was entirely contained in the hull.
---------------
There was a young lady named Bright
Who traveled much faster than light
She departed one day
In a relative way
And returned the previous night.
-------------
There once was a fencer named Fisk
Whose movements were agile and brisk
So quick was his action
The Lorentz contraction
Diminished his sword to a disk.
--------------
(There's also a bawdy version of that somewhere, referring to a different "sword".)
"Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."
"Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:
Leopoldstadt, the play by Tom Stoppard, has a mathematician in it, Ludwig, and some mathematics.
People always are asking Ludwig to examine their child, who they think might be a prodigy. Ludwig always asks the children, 'what is the sum of all the numbers 1-20?' and/or '1-100?'. If they answer quickly, he asks for the sum of 1-100; if they don't answer that quickly, they fail the test. How does Ludwig know?
(If you look it up then you not only aren't a prodigy, you're a dumbass.)
Well, psychohistory is presented as a sort of mathematics for predicting the future, I think it fits the theme.
Likewise, I'm not sure it's on the list, but starship troopers has a kind of mathematics for government (the military dictatorship with citizen-by-merit is provably optimal, not just a random system).
It fictionalized "math" but still fits the generic idea, IMHO.
I'd push back. Starship Troopers can be argued to be about political science or the like, but there's nothing about the reasoning that's inherently mathematical.
Where I'm more on the fence are about works that rely strongly on mathematical physics, like Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, or the parts of Pohl's Gateway series that most explicitly refer to black holes. I'd still say those are not "mathematical fiction", but at least it's close.
What an odd swipe at particle physics when it has nothing to do with the link. Your comment is a gross mischaracterization of particle physics and particle physicists. The vast majority of physicists in the field are clear-eyed about what is physics and what is beautiful (and ugly) math. In fact, the more one goes to "equations [that] describe nature accurately" the more complicated the equations are. No one is claiming that nature is described by beautiful equations by fiat.
Pure math fiction
[edit: I realise they are not specifically about _particle_ physics, but these are the two I could find back in 2 minutes. Also, my comment was meant to be tongue in cheek ]
Consulting for "A Beautiful Mind" was in part an exercise in mathematical fiction. The later math is imagined to fit the story. John Nash even wrote me to ask what the math on the clipboard meant, as his film self recovered on a porch.
In various venues, I explained that mathematicians don't have a lot of experience writing fiction. Other than grant proposals...
John Nash saw the symbol pi as just a Greek letter. In grad school he proudly used every Greek letter in a paper. I was asked to decorate his (film) dorm window in grease pencil, and by chance a photograph of Russell Crowe through this window became one of the most widely distributed promo stills. He's looking intent behind the equation "0 < pi < 1", straight from Nash's paper.
The reaction in my community, which I quite enjoyed, would disabuse anyone of the idea that mathematicians are less cripplingly conventional than other people. To the majority of mathematicians, pi is tied to the circle. A great UC Berkeley email thread speculated that I was trying to make Russell Crowe look like a fool.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/614cOQl6DwL._AC_SL1000_....
For Japanese readers, I have been following "Hamamura Nagisa no Keisan Nooto" (Hamamura Nagisa's Calculation Notes), which is a light novel mystery series. Most chapters contain some crime by a math-minded terrorist, and the solutions to the mysteries always involve math. It covers a wide range of topics from simple fractions to Fermat's Last Theorem. It's a wonderful series for people who like math.
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B5%9C%E6%9D%91%E6%B8%9A%E3...
English summaries for each volume: https://uguu.org/words/math.html
Robert Heinlein's "... And he built a crooked house" is both hilarious and mathematical, although perhaps in different parts of the same story.
https://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/CrookedHouse.pdf
Thanks to this link I just bought a lot of books.
I'd note: Greg Egan is pretty well (if not completely) represented, but how is Permutation City not on the list?!
Also: Neverness by David Zindell is extremely good. Almost certainly the best SF work of its decade. Very underrated.
Nice. The mathematical connection to some of these is pretty thin.
I'd add:
Jeffrey Kegler, The God Proof (novel about a lost manuscript of Kurt Gödel)
Norbert Wiener, The Tempter (novel about a patent troll math professor)
Martin Gardner, The Magic Numbers of Dr Matrix (other Martin Gardner books are there)
George Gamow, Mr. Tomkins in Wonderland (didactic about special relativity, there is other physics stuff on the list so why not)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle -- I haven't read this but I think it had a mathematician character
P. J. Plauger, Wet Blanket -- part of "Fighting Madness" series, about a physicst making universe-changing discoveries. The author is also a noted software developer who co-wrote at least two books with Brian Kernighan.
Maybe a bit out there, but Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, not mathematical per se but has mathematical asides, and is informed by statistics and game theory.
Others I'm not remembering, I'm sure.
Like many classic science fiction "novels", including Foundation, Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos is really a collection of linked novellas.
The last one has the hero and heroine recruiting the spirit of Lobachevsky to help them recover their daughter from non-Euclidean hell.
I went looking for Rudy Rucker on this list, and am satisfied. He's wild, highly recommend. Enjoy some merge with someone: "the drug "merge" is a key element in the novel "Wetware". Merge is a drug that causes users to soften into a puddle, experience oneness with the universe, and fuse conscious entities. "
This is a really cool list, if not a little impenetrable if you aren't familiar with an artists work — does anyone have a work that they would recommend, in particular a novel?
That's always my problem with these huge lists. I feel like any recommendation is so much more useful if it's accompanied by at least a bit of context about why it's being recommended. Whenever I ask for recommendations on reddit or elsewhere, I prefer 2 or 3 answers with information over one of the 20 item list dumps. This site does actually have some snippets of context, you just have to basically click on one (I guess at random) to get to them. Some categorization or other discovery feature might help greatly I think.
Anyway, I will second the other reply's recommendation of Borges also with the caveat that he didn't write novels. His short stories are phenomenal. They are also a bit more philosophical than "mathematical", but some of them (like The Library of Babylon) deal a bit with the intersection of mathematical ideas (combinatorics and infinity in that one's case) with the way that playing with them would impact people and society.
The best advice for reading him would be, assuming you are reading in English, to pick up Penguin's Collected Fictions edition, containing a good translation of a lot of his short stories (and poetry as well). Skip past the first collection of short stories ("A Universal History of Iniquity") as it's pretty good but not his best. Start with the collection called "Fictions". Its first story is Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which gives you a good taste of how he writes.
Flatland is a classic, though it's almost a pamphlet. While you asked for a novel, I can't resist recommending the short fiction of Borges.
I would suggest Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture - I read it many many years ago, and not only found it very entertaining, it also ultimately sparked my interest in mathematical research :)
if you want a really good book about mathematicians rather than mathematics per se, I can recommended "uncle petros and goldbach's conjecture"
Not in this list, but I feel Dante deserves an honorable mention for his inclusion of an explanation of the hypersphere (3-sphere) in the Divine Comedy.
Great write up here[1]
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252338100_Dante_and...
I remember way back when (like about 50 or so years ago) about a crew of maths guys flying a ship through something like tensor space - an actualisation of maths. I cannot for the life of me (or google) remember what it was called or who it was by. Might be on that web page, but too difficult to navigate for me!
Neverness by David Zindell? Not quite 50 years though.
I know what you mean, but that's not it - this was a short story.
Mathematical fiction is tough, because of the problems with "mathematical counterfactuals". Why not go with mathematical poetry instead? There are nice sections of same in the Clifton Fadiman anthologies. The first of these is also from The Space Child's Mother Goose. (All from memory, so please pardon any errors.)
---------------
Three jolly sailors from Blandon-on-Tyne
Went to sea in a bottle by Klein
They found the view exceedingly dull
For the sea was entirely contained in the hull.
---------------
There was a young lady named Bright
Who traveled much faster than light
She departed one day
In a relative way
And returned the previous night.
-------------
There once was a fencer named Fisk
Whose movements were agile and brisk
So quick was his action
The Lorentz contraction
Diminished his sword to a disk.
--------------
(There's also a bawdy version of that somewhere, referring to a different "sword".)
My favorite:
"Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."
"Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustrum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!
I'd completely forgotten that one!!
I just recall the (non-mathematical) poem about the haircut.
Certainly that section generally comes more to mind these days in the age of LLMs ..
Leopoldstadt, the play by Tom Stoppard, has a mathematician in it, Ludwig, and some mathematics.
People always are asking Ludwig to examine their child, who they think might be a prodigy. Ludwig always asks the children, 'what is the sum of all the numbers 1-20?' and/or '1-100?'. If they answer quickly, he asks for the sum of 1-100; if they don't answer that quickly, they fail the test. How does Ludwig know?
(If you look it up then you not only aren't a prodigy, you're a dumbass.)
originally attributed to a young Gauss, according to my teacher who loved telling this story.
https://www.nctm.org/Publications/TCM-blog/Blog/The-Story-of...
This website reminds me of the "old" internet. Love it!
Foundation (Asimov)? I don't think it merits a mention here. Or rather, if it should be included, so should many, many more entries.
Well, psychohistory is presented as a sort of mathematics for predicting the future, I think it fits the theme.
Likewise, I'm not sure it's on the list, but starship troopers has a kind of mathematics for government (the military dictatorship with citizen-by-merit is provably optimal, not just a random system).
It fictionalized "math" but still fits the generic idea, IMHO.
I'd push back. Starship Troopers can be argued to be about political science or the like, but there's nothing about the reasoning that's inherently mathematical.
Where I'm more on the fence are about works that rely strongly on mathematical physics, like Poul Anderson's Tau Zero, or the parts of Pohl's Gateway series that most explicitly refer to black holes. I'd still say those are not "mathematical fiction", but at least it's close.
It did have the awesome scene where the fresh post-doc is challenged to integrate some stuff in his head by his new advisor.
"many, many more entries" are included. Moby Dick and War and Peace are in here.
Clifton Fadiman edited two collections of mathematical fiction "Fantasia Mathematica" and "The Mathematical Magpie". I have them and enjoyed both.
That's where I'd start. If memory serves, Fantasia Mathematica was the first/best one.
And at least one of the recommended works -- The Devil and Simon Flagg -- is anthologize there.
My reading anthology book in primary school had Asimov's "The feeling of power". I was glad to see it was already in this list.
[flagged]
What an odd swipe at particle physics when it has nothing to do with the link. Your comment is a gross mischaracterization of particle physics and particle physicists. The vast majority of physicists in the field are clear-eyed about what is physics and what is beautiful (and ugly) math. In fact, the more one goes to "equations [that] describe nature accurately" the more complicated the equations are. No one is claiming that nature is described by beautiful equations by fiat.
give 2 examples from 2025
There you go:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037026932...
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/2987/1/...
Pure math fiction [edit: I realise they are not specifically about _particle_ physics, but these are the two I could find back in 2 minutes. Also, my comment was meant to be tongue in cheek ]
Or economics papers for the kiddie version