Math-Inspired Fiction
Discover captivating math-inspired fiction books! Explore novels and stories where mathematics fuels creativity, mystery, and adventure. Perfect for book lovers and math enthusiasts alike.
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A Certain Ambiguity
by Gaurav Suri
While taking a class on infinity at Stanford in the late 1980s, Ravi Kapoor discovers that he is confronting the same mathematical and philosophical dilemmas that his mathematician grandfather had faced many decades earlier--and that had landed him in jail. Charged under an obscure blasphemy law in a small New Jersey town in 1919, Vijay Sahni is challenged by a skeptical judge to defend his belief that the certainty of mathematics can be extended to all human knowledge--including religion. Together, the two men discover the power--and the fallibility--of what has long been considered the pinnacle of human certainty, Euclidean geometry. As grandfather and grandson struggle with the question of whether there can ever be absolute certainty in mathematics or life, they are forced to reconsider their fundamental beliefs and choices. Their stories hinge on their explorations of parallel developments in the study of geometry and infinity--and the mathematics throughout is as rigorous and fascinating as the narrative and characters are compelling and complex. Moving and enlightening, A Certain Ambiguity is a story about what it means to face the extent--and the limits--of human knowledge.
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Crimes and Mathdemeanors
by Leith Hathout
Each chapter presents a new detective story with a mathematical puzzle at its core. Readers must test skills in mathematics and physics and enjoy Ravi's clever analysis of the intrigues using trigonometry, probability, combinatorics, deductive reasoning and wit.
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Pythagoras' Revenge
by Arturo Sangalli
The celebrated mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras left no writings. But what if he had and the manuscript had never been found? Where would it be located? Two mathematicians, one American, one British, set out, unbeknownst to each other, to find the missing manuscript.
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Pythagorean Crimes
by Tefcros Michaelides
At the root of this historically based work of fiction lies the question as to whether the solution to a mathematical problem could inspire such passion, so intense and perilous, as to drive someone to murder.
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The Fractal Murders
by Mark Cohen
Now in paperback--the lively first novel featuring former Marine JAG and private eye Pepper Keane. When math professor Jayne Smyers discovers that three murder victims with apparently unrelated cases were each an expert in fractal geometry, she hires Pepper to find the killer.
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The Witch of Agnesi
by Robert Spiller
A coven of witches, a teenage comic book magnate, a skinhead Neanderthal with violent propensities, an abusive father, an amorous science teacher, and a mistranslated medieval mathematics manuscript figure prominently in this new mystery set in modern-day Colorado
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The Unknowns
by Benedict Carey
When people start vanishing from a godforsaken trailer park next to the Folsom Energy Plant, two eleven-year-olds investigate using mathematical clues that were hastily planted by their friend Mrs. Clarke before she disappeared.
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Quicksilver
by Neal Stephenson
In which Daniel Waterhouse, fearless thinker and courageous Puritan, pursues knowledge in the company of the greatest minds of Baroque-era Europe -- in a chaotic world where reason wars with the bloody ambitions of the mighty, and where catastrophe, natural or otherwise, can alter the political landscape overnight.
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The Number Devil
by Hans Magnus Enzensberger
In 12 dreams, Robert, a boy who hates math, encounters a sly, clever number devil who introduces him to the wonders of numbers: infinite numbers, prime numbers, Fibonacci numbers, and numbers that expand without end.
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The Man who Counted
by Malba Tahan
A collection of famous mathematical puzzles, taken from a popular newspaper column, features the "writings" of the fictional author, Malba Tahan, who describes different mathematical puzzles and solutions applied to real situations.
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Flatland
by Edwin Abbott Abbott
Flatland, which is written under the pseudonym "a square", offers pointed observations on the social hierarchy of Victorian culture. Flatland's more enduring contribution is its examination of dimensions; in the words of noted writer Isaac Asimov, Flatland is "the best introduction one can find into the manner of perceiving dimensions." As such, Flatland is still popular among mathematics, physics and computer science students.
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Flatterland
by Ian Stewart
First there was Edwin A. Abbott's remarkable Flatland, published in 1884, and one of the all-time classics of popular mathematics. Now, from mathematician and accomplished science writer Ian Stewart, comes what Nature calls "a superb sequel." Through larger-than-life characters and an inspired story line, Flatterland explores our present understanding of the shape and origins of the universe, the nature of space, time, and matter, as well as modern geometries and their applications. The journey begins when our heroine, Victoria Line, comes upon her great-great-grandfather A. Square's diary, hidden in the attic. The writings help her to contact the Space Hopper, who tempts her away from her home and family in Flatland and becomes her guide and mentor through ten dimensions. In the tradition of Alice in Wonderland and The Phantom Toll Booth, this magnificent investigation into the nature of reality is destined to become a modern classic.
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An Invisible Sign of My Own
by Aimee Bender
Aimee Bender’s stunning debut collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, proved her to be one of the freshest voices in American fiction. Now, in her first novel, she builds on that early promise. Mona Gray was ten when her father contracted a mysterious illness and she became a quitter, abandoning each of her talents just as pleasure became intense. The only thing she can’t stop doing is math: She knocks on wood, adds her steps, and multiplies people in the park against one another. When Mona begins teaching math to second-graders, she finds a ready audience. But the difficult and wonderful facts of life keep intruding. She finds herself drawn to the new science teacher, who has an unnerving way of seeing through her intricately built façade. Bender brilliantly directs her characters, giving them unexpected emotional depth and setting them in a calamitous world, both fancifully surreal and startlingly familiar.
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The Sand-Reckoner
by Gillian Bradshaw
The young scholar Archimedes has just had the best three years of his life at Ptolemy's Museum at Alexandria. To be able to talk and think all day, every day, sharing ideas and information with the world's greatest minds, is heaven to Archimedes. But heaven must be forsaken when he learns that his father is ailing, and his home city of Syracuse is at war with the Romans. Reluctant but resigned, Archimedes takes himself home to find a job building catapults as a royal engineer. Though Syracuse is no Alexandria, Archimedes also finds that life at home isn't as boring or confining as he originally thought. He finds fame and loss, love and war, wealth and betrayal-none of which affects him nearly as much as the divine beauty of mathematics.
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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
by Mark Haddon
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A modern classic—both poignant and funny—about a boy with autism who sets out to solve the murder of a neighbor's dog and discovers unexpected truths about himself and the world. “Disorienting and reorienting the reader to devastating effect.... Suspenseful and harrowing.” —The New York Times Book Review Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow. This improbable story of Christopher's quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog makes for one of the most captivating, unusual, and widely heralded novels in recent years.
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Leaning Towards Infinity
by Sue Woolfe
This is the story of three generations of women who live with the conflict of their own genius as mathematicians, and the competing responsibilities of bringing up and relating to their own children.
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Ratner's Star
by Don DeLillo
"A whimsical, surrealistic excursion into the modern scientific mind." --The New Yorker One of DeLillo's first novels, Ratner's Star follows Billy, the genius adolescent, who is recruited to live in obscurity, underground, as he tries to help a panel of estranged, demented, and yet lovable scientists communicate with beings from outer space. It is a mix of quirky humor, science, mathematical theories, as well as the complex emotional distance and sadness people feel. Ratner's Star demonstrates both the thematic and prosaic muscularity that typifies DeLillo's later and more recent works, like The Names (which is also available in Vintage Contemporaries). "His most spectacularly inventive novel." --The New York Times
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Measuring the World
by Daniel Kehlmann
Measuring the World marks the debut of a glorious new talent on the international scene. Young Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann’s brilliant comic novel revolves around the meeting of two colossal geniuses of the Enlightenment. Late in the eighteenth century, two young Germans set out to measure the world. One of them, the aristocratic naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, negotiates jungles, voyages down the Orinoco River, tastes poisons, climbs the highest mountain known to man, counts head lice, and explores and measures every cave and hill he comes across. The other, the reclusive and barely socialized mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, can prove that space is curved without leaving his home. Terrifyingly famous and wildly eccentric, these two polar opposites finally meet in Berlin in 1828, and are immediately embroiled in the turmoil of the post-Napolean world.
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The Oxford Murders
by Guillermo Martinez
Two mathematicians must join forces to stop a serial killer in this spellbinding international bestseller A paperback sensation in Argentina, Spain, and the United Kingdom, The Oxford Murders has been hailed as "a remarkable feat" (Time Out London) and its author as "one of Argentina's most distinctive voices" (The Times Literary Supplement). It begins on a summer day in Oxford, when a young Argentine graduate student finds his landlady-an elderly woman who helped crack the Enigma Code during World War II -murdered in cold blood. Meanwhile, a renowned Oxford logician receives an anonymous note bearing a circle and the words "the first of a series." As the murders begin to pile up and more symbols are revealed, it is up to this unlikely pair to decipher the pattern before the killer strikes again.
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The Visiting Professor
by Robert Littell
A delicious post -cold war romp, The Visiting Professor is another classic page-tuner for the many fans that have come to recognize Robert Littell-thanks to The Company and its recent TNT miniseries-as a thriller writer on par with John le Carré and Alan Furst. Lemuel Falk, "a Russian theoretical chaoticist on the lam from terrestrial chaos," has applied for permission to leave Russia every year for the past twenty-three years. Unexpectedly, his twenty-fourth request is approved and he accepts a chair as visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Chaos-Related Studies in upstate New York. As soon as he arrives, he is plunged into another kind of chaos-an academic catfight, an affair with a much-younger hairdresser, and a dangerous serial killer.
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7 Steps to Midnight
by Richard Matheson
When a mysterious impostor steals his identity and life, mathematician Chris Barton is thrust into a whirlwind of danger. Full of twists and surprises, this is the story of an ordinary man driven to the breaking point in a game where there are no rules, nothing it as it seems, and it is always "7 Steps to Midnight."
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Coyote Moon
by John A. Miller
You may think Field of Dreams meets Cocoon, or perhaps, The Natural meets Love Story, some may even say that it's Ball Four clashing with Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. But, John Miller's Coyote Moon is all of these and more. In a gone-to-seed trailer park on the edge of the Mojave Desert, quantum physics runs headlong into reincarnation as the park's highly eccentric residents sit around in the evenings drinking home-brewed beer and asking themselves: Can a young, previously unheard-of rookie baseball player be the latest in a line of reincarnated spirits leading back to Sir Isaac Newton? And in the clubhouse of the Oakland Athletics, the mysterious athlete in question, Henry Spencer, a young North Carolinian with nothing more than a high school education and a fuzzy memory, tries to reconcile, among other arcane topics, Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle with the somewhat less intellectual world of baseball. Coyote Moon, John Miller's eagerly awaited fourth novel, will have you laughing with delight and wondering to the very end just who the young Henry Spencer really is, and what exactly, links him to the most unusual trailer park in Needles, California.
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The French Mathematician
by Tom Petsinis
Rich in historical detail and bursting with intellectual passion, this captivating novel describes a genius's valiant quest for truth in post-Napoleon France, a turbulent and uncertain era that in many ways mirrors the world today.
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Sir Cumference and the First Round Table
by Cindy Neuschwander
Join Sir Cumference, Lady Di of Ameter, and their son Radius for wordplay, puns, and problem solving in this geometry-packed math adventure. King Arthur was a good ruler, but now he needs a good ruler. What would you do if the neighboring kingdom were threatening war? Naturally, you'd call your strongest and bravest knights together to come up with a solution. But when your conference table causes more problems than the threat of your enemy, you need expert help. Enter Sir Cumference, his wife Lady Di of Ameter, and their son Radius. With the help of the carpenter, Geo of Metry, this sharp-minded team designs the perfect table conducive to discussing the perfect plan for peace. The first in Sir Cumference series, Sir Cumference and the First Round Table makes math fun and accessible for everyone.
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Inverted World
by Christopher Priest
Featured in Science Fiction: The Best 100 Novels Winner of the British Science Fiction Award Nominated for the Hugo Award The “devilishly entertaining” masterpiece of hard science fiction, set in a city moving through a strange, dystopian world—from the multi-award-winning author of The Prestige (Time Out New York) The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city’s engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the “optimum” into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death. The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in crèches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they are carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. And yet the city is in crisis. The people are growing restive, the population is dwindling, and the rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping ever farther behind the optimum. Helward Mann is a member of the city’s elite. Better than anyone, he knows how tenuous is the city’s continued existence. But the world—he is about to discover—is infinitely stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well.
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Spaceland
by Rudy Rucker
Joe Cube is a Silicon Valley hotshot--well, a would-be hotshot anyway--hoping that the 3-D TV project he's managing will lead to the big money IPO he's always dreamed of. On New Year's Eve, hoping to impress his wife, he sneaks home the prototype. It brings no new warmth to their cooling relationship, but it does attract someone else's attention. When Joe sees a set of lips talking to him (floating in midair) and feels the poke of a disembodied finger (inside him), it's not because of the champagne he's drunk. He has just met Momo, a woman from the All, a world of four spatial dimensions for whom our narrow world, which she calls Spaceland, is something like a rug, but one filled with motion and life. Momo has a business proposition for Joe, an offer she won't let him refuse. The upside potential becomes much clearer to him once she helps him grow a new eye (on a stalk) that can see in the fourth-dimensional directions, and he agrees. After that it's a wild ride through a million-dollar night in Las Vegas, a budding addiction to tasty purple 4-D food, a failing marriage, eye-popping excursions into the All, and encounters with Momo's foes, rubbery red critters who steal money, offer sage advice and sometimes messily explode. Joe is having the time of his life, until Momo's scheme turns out to have angles he couldn't have imagined. Suddenly the fate of all life here in Spaceland is at stake. Rudy Rucker is a past master at turning mathematical concepts into rollicking science fiction adventure, from Spacetime Donuts and White Light to The Hacker and the Ants. In the tradition of Edwin A. Abbott's classic novel, Flatland, Rucker gives us a tour of higher mathematics and visionary realities. Spaceland is Flatland on hyperdrive!
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Death Qualified
by Kate Wilhelm
Lucas Kendricks arrives at his wife Nell's property seven years after disappearing and is instantly shot dead. Accused of murder, Nell turns to lawyer Frank Holloway. Knowing he can't win this case alone, he calls upon his daughter, Barbara, who gave up her practice years before but is legally able to defend clients in death penalty cases. Barbara finds herself drawn to the case and reclaims the search for truth that first led her to the law.
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Factoring Humanity
by Robert J. Sawyer
A twenty-first-century scientist sacrifices her family life to decipher the strange signals coming from interstellar space, messages that show her how to build an extraordinary machine that allows one to travel via the mind.
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Distress
by Greg Egan
In the year 2055, a disease called "Distress" affects millions, and when investigative reporter Andrew Worth travels to the virtual planet of Stateless to document a gathering of physicists, his focus, Violet Mosala, begins to receive death threats, and he discovers that "Distress" is linked to the conference and to the end of the world. Reprint.
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After Math
by Miriam Webster
A murder victim tries to figure out who killed him but first he has to figure out the rules of being a ghost.
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Beyond the Limit
by Joan Spicci
Beyond the Limit, a novel researched for more than ten years by mathematician and educator Joan Spicci, is the true story of Sofya Kovalevskaya's remarkable personal journey, from the constricted life of a teenage girl in St. Petersburg to the triumph of becoming the first woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics and join the ranks of Europe's great mathematicians of the nineteenth century. For more than one hundred years, Kovalevskaya's struggle has inspired women of all nations to fight for educational opportunities equal to those available to men. But while she is known for the science and mathematics Opportunity Days sponsored in her name at major universities, the full drama and power of her life has never been told as it now unfolds in this thoroughly researched novel. Based on Kovalevskaya's own writings, and many other primary sources, the story of her life plays out against a panorama of the turbulent, intellectually challenging 1860s and 1870s, as it follows a brilliant, complex woman on a quest that seems almost impossible to imagine, more than a century later. Friends with some of the intellectual giants of her time, ranging from Dostoevsky to Darwin, she was the equal of them all, as chronicled in this extraordinary work. In the Russia of the 1860s, young women did as their fathers bid them, and after marriage was arranged, they did what their husbands told them to do. But Sofya Krukovskaya was different. Born to a family in which science and mathematics were already part of its heritage, Sofya takes every opportunity to learn more about mathematics in tutoring sessions. But her tutors know that if she is to realize her potential, she must study at a university. In order to do that, she lies to her family and makes a marriage of convenience with archaeologist Vladimir Kovalevsky, enabling her and her sister Anya to leave Russia and seek education at a German university. However, leaving Russia is only the first hurdle she must vault to pursue her dream of becoming Europe's first woman mathematician. When she applies for admission, she is refused by stubbornly prejudiced university officials, forcing her to study covertly with the great mathematician Karl Weierstrass, under whose guidance she is at last able to gain her doctorate. Very close to her sister Anya, a talented writer whose revolutionary fervor takes her to the powder keg of the Paris Commune of 1871, more than once Sofya has to forsake her own goals to save Anya from ruin, and even death. Married in name only for many years, Sofya and Vladimir have a complex, volatile relationship. Loving each other, they're forced by the needs of their careers to withstand long separations and other trials. Across Europe, through tragedy and finally triumph, their story is richly told against the backdrop of history. Mathematician and educator Joan Spicci's compelling narrative accurately documents Sofya's educational and professional struggle, in Beyond the Limit. This fascinating, intimate portrait of Sofya Kovalevskaya's life confronts issues of women's rights and feminism that continue to face women who pursue careers in the sciences in the twenty-first century.
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Advanced Calculus of Murder
by Erik Rosenthal
Mathematician sleuth Dan Brodsky becomes embroiled, once again, in murder when a fellow participant in a conference at Oxford University is killed and close friend, Paul Hobart, is accused of the crime
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The Mind-Body Problem
by Rebecca Goldstein
The hilarious underground bestseller about one woman’s pursuit of carnal pleasure—and the philosophy that gets in the way. When Renee Feuer goes to college, one of the first lessons she tries to learn is how to liberate herself from the restrictions of her Orthodox Jewish background. As she discovers the pleasures of the body, Renee also learns about the excitements of the mind. She enrolls as a philosophy graduate student, then marries Noam Himmel, the world-renowned mathematician. But Renee discovers that being married to a genius is a less elevating experience than expected, and that the allure of sex still beckons. Her quest for a solution to the conflicting demands of sensuality and spirit is a touching and always humorous adventure. “Terrific. . . . The first fifty or so pages are so clever and funny that I had to put the book down and go to the fridge to cool off.”—The New York Times Book Review “A terrific first novel . . . Goldenstein is intelligent and perceptive, bawdy and witty—an articulate writer of great talent.”—The Los Angeles Times Book Review
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The Dot and the Line
by Norton Juster
A straight line falls in love with a dot and develops his talents to form all kinds of geometric shapes in order to win her affections.
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The Phantom Tollbooth
by Norton Juster
“Comes up bright and new every time I read it . . . it will continue to charm and delight for a very long time yet.” --Phillip Pullman, New York Times bestselling author of His Dark Materials With almost 5 million copies sold in the 60 years since it was published, generations of readers have journeyed with Milo to the Lands Beyond in this beloved classic. Enriched by Jules Feiffer’s splendid illustrations, the wit, wisdom, and wordplay of Norton Juster’s offbeat fantasy are as beguiling as ever. For Milo, everything’s a bore. When a tollbooth mysteriously appears in his room, he drives through only because he’s got nothing better to do. But on the other side, things seem different. Milo visits the Island of Conclusions (you get there by jumping), learns about time from a ticking watchdog named Tock, and even embarks on a quest to rescue Rhyme and Reason. Somewhere along the way, Milo realizes something astonishing. Life is far from dull. In fact, it’s exciting beyond his wildest dreams!