If the point is to list SF stories where a mathematical idea (broadly construed) or a mathematician plays a central role, the following immediately come to mind (for me): Asimov's Foundation, Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life," and HG Wells's "The Star." (Latter two are not exactly book-length, but I really liked them...)
Best Mathematical Science Fiction Books
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Re: Best Mathematical Science Fiction Books
#12Flatland was highly recommended in homeschooling circles I ran in back in the day.
A book that notably does not belong on this list but I read it because I thought it would be mathy has the title The Man Who Counts which I completely misinterpreted and continued to be befuddled by even after I finished reading it, having spent the entire book waiting for the math part of the story that never came.
Re: Best Mathematical Science Fiction Books
#13The url makes this website look like it’s gonna be an Amazon link farm, and that’s exactly what it is.
Re: Best Mathematical Science Fiction Books
#14Interesting that they included Cryptonomicon , which is arguably more about IT than mathematics, but they failed to include Stephenson's Anathem [1]: a book about people who live in monasteries called "maths" [2], who spend their whole lives doing mathematics (including at least one scene where the monks demonstrate a basic proof to a novice), in a book which is at its core an apology for mathematical realism, and ap…
yeah i cant imagine a more “mathematical science fiction” book than Anathem. i thought it was brilliant, but it is definitely not for everyone haha.
Re: Best Mathematical Science Fiction Books
#15Carl Sagan’s novel Contact is ultimately about a surprising fictional mathematical result, although this is only revealed IIRC toward the end.
The movie adaptation with Jody Foster changes the plot and leaves out much that the 90s movie studios thought general audiences wouldn’t be interested in.
Without giving away too much, the fictional result is a really clever thought experiment by Sagan about the nature of god, if he exists. (Although Sagan wasn’t the first to think of it, he was the first to put it in such an accessible way.)
It’s a fantastic novel, which for some reason isn’t much read these days.
Re: Best Mathematical Science Fiction Books
#16I really enjoyed the three body problem. At some point it became a bit ridiculous but I liked the ending.
Re: Best Mathematical Science Fiction Books
#17Time to share some poetry from the Cyberiad by Stanislav Lem:
Re: Best Mathematical Science Fiction Books
#18I remember in the early 2000s reading a short story collection, a sci-fi book in the nanotech subgenre. One of the stories had something to do with organisms that would search for newer axiom systems in which they could thrive, somehow the more interesting, or rich, axiom systems being the ones that would give better survival odds. Does anyone remember the particulars of this story? I've been wanting to reread it for…
This sounds like the book: https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?23392 The story is almost certainly Stephen Baxter's The Logic Pool .
YES! That's the one :-)
Thanks for identifying it. And it was in that anthology "Nanotech" having editors Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. I found this interesting article about the story, with links to other similar stories:
https://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumb...
And this quote:
"Marsden's data stores contain a fragmented catalogue of mathematical variants. All founded on the postulates of arithmetic, but differing in their resolution of undecidable hypothesis." "Undecidability. You're talking about the incompleteness theorems," "Right. No logical system rich enough to contain the axioms of simple arithmetic can ever be made complete. It is always possible to construct statements that can be neither disproved nor proved by deduction from the axioms; instead the logical system must be enriched by incorporating the truth or falsehood of such statements as additional axioms..." The Continuum Hypothesis was an example. There were several orders of infinity. There were 'more' real numbers, scattered like dust in the interval between zero and one, that there were integers. Was there an order of infinity between the reals and the integers. This was undecidable, within logically simpler systems like set theory; additional assumptions had to be made. "So one can generate many versions of mathematics, by adding these true-false axioms." "And then searching on, seeking out statements which are undecidable in the new system. Yes. Because of incompleteness, there is an infinite number of such mathematical variants, spreading like the branches of a tree...."
Re: Best Mathematical Science Fiction Books
#19I remember in the early 2000s reading a short story collection, a sci-fi book in the nanotech subgenre. One of the stories had something to do with organisms that would search for newer axiom systems in which they could thrive, somehow the more interesting, or rich, axiom systems being the ones that would give better survival odds. Does anyone remember the particulars of this story? I've been wanting to reread it for…
This sounds like the book: https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?23392 The story is almost certainly Stephen Baxter's The Logic Pool .
I also note that _The Logic Pool_ is also available in a short story collection of Stephen Baxter's called _Vacuum Diagrams_
http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/baxter/index.htm
Quoting from the beginning of the story:
This time he would reach the Sky. This time, before the Culling cut him away... The tree of axiomatic systems beneath him was broad, deep, strong. He looked around him, at sibling-twins who had branched at choice-points, most of them thin, insipid structures. They spread into the distance, infiltrating the Pool with their webs of logic. He almost pitied their attenuated forms as he reached upwards, his own rich growth path assured... Almost pitied. But when the Sky was so close there was no time for pity, no time for awareness of anything but growth, extension. Little consciousness persisted between Cullings. But he could remember a little of his last birthing; and surely he had never risen so high, never felt the logical richness of the tree beneath him surge upwards through him like this, empowering him. Now there was something ahead of him: a new postulate, hanging above him like some immense fruit. He approached it warily, savoring its compact, elegant form. The fibers of his being pulsed as the few, strong axioms at the core of his structure sought to envelop this new statement. But they could not. They could not. The new statement was undecidable, not deducible from the set within him. His excitement grew. The new hypothesis was simple of expression, yet ....
Re: Best Mathematical Science Fiction Books
#20Interesting that they included Cryptonomicon , which is arguably more about IT than mathematics, but they failed to include Stephenson's Anathem [1]: a book about people who live in monasteries called "maths" [2], who spend their whole lives doing mathematics (including at least one scene where the monks demonstrate a basic proof to a novice), in a book which is at its core an apology for mathematical realism, and ap…
yeah i cant imagine a more “mathematical science fiction” book than Anathem. i thought it was brilliant, but it is definitely not for everyone haha.
Me too! I have a feeling that maybe Anathem appeals to the kind of people who themselves would be pushed into a math at a young age, like Barb. If I was on Arbre, there is no way I would have been tolerated in Sæcular society beyond my 11th birthday, and a.s. I'd be in a centenarian by now.