Ask Slashdot: Mathematical Fiction? 278
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?)"
Try Neal Stephenson (Score:1, Interesting)
> Has any author managed to hit the same vein as Stephenson did?
Yes, he's called Neal Stephenson: Baroque Cycle is certainly not too short, and Anathem is beautifully mathematical.
Flatland: A Romance Of Many Dimensions (Score:0, Interesting)
Over a hundred years old and well ahead of it's time.
Re:Hofstadter (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.
The greatest one of all (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
I think (Score:5, Interesting)
You may like 50 shades of Grey, it has the number 50 on it.
Re:The greatest one of all (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:flatland (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Too short? (Score:5, Interesting)
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'.