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.
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.
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. "
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.)
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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.
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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.
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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".)
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.)
Foundation (Asimov)? I don't think it merits a mention here. Or rather, if it should be included, so should many, many more entries.
Clifton Fadiman edited two collections of mathematical fiction "Fantasia Mathematica" and "The Mathematical Magpie". I have them and enjoyed both.
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.
This website reminds me of the "old" internet. Love it!
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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...