Mathematics and Literature
It may not be obvious to the casual observer that the fields of mathematics and literature have anything whatsoever to do with each other. Certainly other fields of human endeavor have proven more appealing to poets and writers, perhaps because they have been more comprehensible. However, mathematicians have inspired work from across the spectrum of literary arts - fiction, poetry, plays, and essays - and in some cases have even contributed to these arts themselves.
Few mathematicians since the Vedic scholars in India have been as concerned with the relationship of verse and mathematics. Their proofs and theorems were often written as poetry, with the structure and meter of the verse reflecting the numerical nature of their subject matter. Omar al-Khayyam was, in his own time, equally famous for his work in verse and for his mathematical reasoning, although he did not combine the two pursuits as thoroughly as the Vedic mathematicians. English mathematicians such as Hamilton, Boole, Sylvester, and Maxwell all wrote poetry as a hobby, although none of them ever enjoyed nearly the critical success al-Khayyam did. Mathematician Felix Hausdorff wrote plays, and his colleague Sonya Kovalevskaya did work in theatre, poetry, and short novels, as well as writing the seminal autobiography of a mathematician. However, perhaps the most famous mathematician-author was Charles Dodgson, also known as Lewis Carroll. Dodgson's most famous works, Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass, were for children, although he also wrote verse, essays, short stories, and other children's books. Much of the delight of the Alice books comes from their inspired use of mathematics and logic puzzles, an interest which was certainly developed in Dodgson's practice of mathematics.
Other literary works have been more directly mathematical in their nature, have been inspired by mathematical progress, or have dealt with the lives of fictional mathematicians. Shakespeare was focused on the concept of zero, which was fairly new to his society; it kept coming up in metaphors and asides in his plays. Flatland, a study in tolerance, was also a description of dimensionality in geometry. Even picture books such as The Dot and the Line: A Mathematical Romance and Math Curse have been written to demonstrate mathematical concepts in more palatable ways to the average reader.
In the late 1990s, there were a few movies made about mathematics or mathematicians. However, the theatre has been fairly short on math plays. Fractals - a particularly popular and accessible branch of mathematics because so many of them can be visually beautiful - were one of the topics of Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia, which chronicled the life of a young mathematical genius. Other works do not abound.
The genre of science fiction has probably used mathematics less than any other technical field as inspiration for its tales. However, some short stories, particularly "A Streetcar Named Mobius" and the works of Greg Egan, do use mathematical themes. Also, Isaac Asimov's classic Foundation series is about the life's work of a mathematician who applies his craft to the behavior of human beings. For the most part, though, in science fiction as in other genres, the related fields of physics and computer science have proven more fruitful inspiration for math-related literature than mathematics itself.
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