Imaginary Numbers

On Saturday, the Fields Institute hosted a panel discussion at the Lillian H. Smith library about math in fiction. Although it was an intriguing theme, the topic was perhaps too broad and led to a scattershot morning lacking cohesion.

Suzanne Church is a short-story writer of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. In a previous life, she was a high-school teacher of math and computer science. So she outlined the idea of introducing fiction (primarily sci-fi) into a math course for a number of reasons: cross-discipline interest, break from formal teaching, etc. The problem was that a math curriculum is already full-time without much wiggle room. With novels, like Charles Eagan's Orthogonal trilogy, you can refer to the work when there is free time. With short stories, such as Ted Chiang's Division By Zero, you have a chance to touch on more authors. Generally though, the examples given had only a tiny bit of math content, but perhaps could be a point of interesting for high-school students.

Tony Pi is also a short-story writer. For his presentation he gave examples of math in fiction. From his own work, a story about Sherlock Holmes, there were bits of math trivia (Marwood's "Long Drop" execution hanging formula) and usage of cryptographic ciphers. For other works, he mostly talked about numerous fictional take on the Infinite Hotel. This led an elderly mathematician in the audience to recall that his life-time love of math came about after reading about the hotel at a young age.

Novelist Karl Schroeder (Candesce series) admitted his reluctance in participating. As a high-school drop-out who failed grade 11 math, he never "got" the abstraction. Yet he is considered to be a "hard sci-fi" author. He explained this contradiction by referring to his latest effort Lock-Step: how to have a galactic empire of thousands of worlds within the limits of the real universe (i.e., no faster-than-light travel, etc.) Given problems and constraints grounded in concrete situations, he is able to work through and think of solutions. Afterward, some math educators commented that they have students who also struggle with mathematical formalism.