The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine (2017) Greg Egan This story is funnier and less mathematical than most of Greg Egan's writing. It concerns the spontaneous evolution of artificial intelligence within the global computer network. But, rather than destroying... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-09-12 19:19:13

Instantiation (2019) Greg Egan In this sequel to 3-adica, the conscious video game characters plan an escape that feels like a cross between Mission Impossible and Inception, but with the addition of famous mathematicians sitting around... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-09-09 16:15:39

3-adica (2018) Greg Egan Sentient characters in a horrific video game combining Jack the Ripper and vampires seek to escape to another game called 3-adica where things are strange but peaceful. This is one of a series of stories... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-09-03 09:02:19

Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 (1982) L. Ron Hubbard In the year 3000, the human race has nearly been destroyed by the Psychlos, an evil alien species who dominate thousands of planets in many universes. Although they view the few remaining humans as little... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-08-26 15:48:47

The Divine Proportions of Luca Pacioli (2019) W.A.W. Parker This novel is a biography of Fra Luca Pacioli in fictionalized form. Pacioli who lived from 1447 to 1517 was an Italian mathematician and Franciscan friar who authored one of the first printed mathematics... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-08-16 15:40:01

MeT APP (2020) Ramprasath In this novella, "MeT APP" is a dating app that Anjali installs on her smartphone because her husband is not fulfilling her emotional needs. The app assigns numerical values to people in order to determine... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-08-11 22:32:17

Miss Havilland (2020) Gay Daly Evelyn Havilland, who left her studies in mathematics at Stanford University in 1917 to aid with the war effort, must decide between marrying a linguistics professor she met when they were both working... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-07-12 14:55:45

On Another Plane (2020) Colin Adams A woman with flowing white hair and flowing white robes sits next to a mathematician on a plane and very casually helps him to prove the Riemann Hypothesis. ‘‘I’m not much for knowing what’s... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-07-09 20:21:26

The Distant Dead (2020) Heather Young When a boy named Sal discovers the burned body of his middle school math teacher, two amateur sleuths try to determine who killed him. One of them is Jake, the volunteer fireman to whom Sal initially... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-07-06 10:55:43

The Outside (2019) Ada Hoffman The way this science fiction novel conflates technology and religion is more interesting than anything it does with mathematics. The "gods" in the book are advanced artificial intelligences and "angels"... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-07-03 09:36:12

The Hidden Girl (2017) Ken Liu The daughter of a general during the Tang Dynasty is kidnapped by an assassin who can travel into higher dimensions. She is trained to also be an assassin, but cleverly plans her own escape. Among... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-06-08 19:07:40

Ghost Days (2013) Ken Liu This short story begins with a very short computer program that computes the Fibonacci numbers which a young student is learning in school. The teacher is one of the human crew of a space ship and the... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-06-08 18:54:47

Geometria (1987) Guillermo del Toro (Writer and Director) A boy whose father has died and who is in danger of failing his math class summons a demon, asking him to reunite his family and to ensure that he never fails geometry again. Both wishes are granted,... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-06-07 10:25:24

The First Task of My Internship (2020) Ziyin Xiong In this short piece (which is more of an extended joke than a story), the narrator is tasked with devising a method to literally fulfill The Olive Garden's promise of "unlimited breadsticks". Some of... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-06-05 14:09:31

La Resta [The Remainder] (2015) Alia Trabucco Zerán Two friends from modern day Santiago travel through Chile using "mortuary mathematics" to attempt to better understand the legacy of their country's dictatorship: [A]nd just as I'm calming down and... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-05-27 10:59:13

Nagel im Himmel (2020) Patrick Hofmann The protagonist in this novel grows up in a loveless, dysfunctional family, but finds refuge and success in mathematics until he is "saved" by a physicist. Since I do not read German, my knowledge of... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-05-22 08:03:54

Dispel Illusion (2019) Mark Lawrence This third book in the "Impossible Times" series continues telling the story of math prodigy Nick Hayes and the bizarre time loop he experiences/causes. Many of the chapters in this book take place in... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-05-19 14:11:05

Limited Wish (2019) Mark Lawrence In this sequel to One Word Kill, math prodigy Nick Hayes develops the theory of time travel that his future self used to go back in time to meet himself in the first book. The idea, which sounds neat... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-05-19 13:46:28

One Word Kill (2019) Mark Lawrence Nick Hayes, a math prodigy with leukemia in the 1980's, meets his future self in this first book of the "Impossible Times" trilogy from Amazon's publishing arm. The consistent time loop that this creates... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-05-19 13:09:46

The Masters (1963) Ursula K. Le~Guin This short story, which takes place in a world where society is medieval and the sun is seen less than once per year, focuses on the mathematical advances brought about by the primary protagonist, Ganil.... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-05-06 14:18:39

Beyond Infinity (2004) Gregory Benford Cley is one of the few "original" humans left in a future where most of the characters are genetically enhanced. These engineered lifeforms, whether they are Supras (a highly advanced humanoid) or based... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-05-04 15:01:57

A Universe of Sufficient Size (2019) Miriam Sved It is only after the death of her father that an Australian sculptor learns that her mother was one of five Hungarian Jews mathematicians who worked on math research together in a public park as Hitler... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-04-19 20:38:44

The Pursuit of the Pankera: A Parallel Novel About Parallel Universes (2020) Robert A. Heinlein This alternative version of the much derided Heinlein novel The Number of the Beast was published in 2020 based on notes by the author who died back in 1988. Apparently, "Pursuit of Pankera" was actually... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-03-31 20:47:20

Machines Like Me (2019) Ian McEwan There are many ways to describe this book without mentioning mathematics: It is a romance between Charlie (a slacker who dabbles in day-trading) and Miranda (the law student who lives in the apartment... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-03-31 10:05:37

The Hyland Resolution (2020) Justin Tarquin Charles Hyland is the sort of math professor who can be totally distracted by a mathematical question while he and several academic colleagues are under attack by an enemy army on the moon. (Specifically,... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-03-23 22:34:39

The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl (2018) Stacy McAnulty A girl who developed "genius level" mathematical abilities after being struck by lightning has a thing or two to learn about life in this novel for young adults. Lucy Callahan finds that after her... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-03-12 15:15:52

Apeirogon: A Novel (2020) Colum McCann This novel with a mathematical title is based on the real lives of two peace activists, Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian and Rami Elhanan, an Israeli, both fathers of young daughters who died violently in... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-03-07 13:54:47

Invisibly Breathing (2019) Eileen Merriman Felix Catalan, a teenager whose autistic tendencies make him unpopular in school, becomes romantically involved with another student whose stutter similarly makes him an outcast. Like many other anti-social... (more)

Last Changed: 2020-03-07 10:20:43

Double Digit (2014) Annabel Monaghan This cleverly titled sequel to A Girl Named Digit follows the continuing adventures of a young "math whiz" whose talents make her both a weapon against and a target of terrorists. (more)

Last Changed: 2020-03-07 07:45:15