01 A work of fiction in which a main character is a mathematician

[Evelyn]

A few that came to mind for me are The Housekeeper and the Professor, The Mathematician's Shiva, and Binti.
Share your recommendations here!

[Amie]

Thanks for reminding me about The Housekeeper and The Professor! Someone recommended it to me at a dinner but I neglected to follow up. I’ll read it for this particular challenge.

[Jeanine]

I'm reading The Tenth Muse at the moment and really like it! It's a recent novel with a female mathematician as the main character, with some history of math but until now mainly tales about being a woman in the math world in the 60s.

[Jo]

Maybe stretching it?
Zenn Diagram by Wendy Brant is about 2 high school students. One is a math-loving girl who tutors trig for profit and to look good on college apps. She wants to go to a prestigious math/science university, but is afraid her family can't afford it. She ends up dating one of the students she tutors and they're both finalists for a scholarship that would let them fulfill their dreams.

Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture: A Novel of Mathematical Obsession by Apostolos K. Doxiadis is where I first heard about Goldbach's Conjecture.

[Evelyn]

Jeanine wrote: "I'm reading The Tenth Muse at the moment and really like it! It's a recent novel with a female mathematician as the main character, with some history of math but until now mainly ta..."

Cool! I don't remember where I saw that, but I added it to my tbr list a little bit ago. That and The Idiot are two I'm considering for this prompt.

[Enrique]

A very good book that fits this prompt is The solitude of prime numbers by Paolo Giordano. Fantastic story. There are two main characters and one of them is a mathematician.

[Colin]

I imagine The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is stretching it a little bit, but it may be time for me to dig out Jurassic Park.

[Dimitris]

I started reading (before 2020 came in) 1Q84, which by a staggering coincidence has a mathematician as a main character. It's one heck of a big book and I've been ~ 250 pages in. So far so good.

[Evelyn]

Ooh, good to know! It's been on my shelf for a little while, but it's a bit intimidating. Between that and Andrew Hodges' biography of Alan Turing, maybe this needs to be my year of intimidating longreads!

[Sam]

I mentioned 1Q84 in the book with a number in the title thread - I'd forgotten that Tengo is a maths tutor so it will count for this as well. I highly recommend it. It is long, but I found myself drawn into it and didn't want it to finish (I find this for most of Murakami's books).

[Anne]

I finished reading "The devotion of suspect X". which I found really nice to read. It seems main character is the woman but with a mathematician and a physicist as the two heroes of the story..

[Colin]

This paper: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewc... lists a few works of fiction that portray mathematicians.

[Angela]

I've just read Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan , in which the main character is female, a mathematician and also working for M15. Although there is not much actual maths in the book (bar a bit of probability) I found it an enjoyable read.

[Colin]

Hm, Douglas Coupland's JPod looks like it has characters who are at least interested in maths. I shall put it on my list and see afterwards whether it was justified.

[Karen]

I read A Doubter's Almanac by Ethan Canin a few years back and really enjoyed it.

[Adam]

The "Bar Lume" series by Marco Malvaldi is a series of detective stories where the main character is a mathematician. Maths and science topics do sometimes turn up in the crimes or their solutions.

[Evelyn]

Just finished The Tenth Muse for this prompt. It took me a little while to get into it, but by the end I couldn't put it down!

[F]

http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFI...

[Katherine]

Angela wrote: "I've just read Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan , in which the main character is female, a mathematician and also working for M15. Although there is not much actual maths in the book (bar ..."

I chose this one to read because I generally like espionage stories and I've liked other books by McEwan. Chapter 15 with both the Monty Hall problem and the mention of the Necker cube redeemed things for me, because for a lot of the book, the character has imposter syndrome about her mathematical ability.

[Colin]

Aaaah! JPod has just arrived at the library for collection, but I think "going to the library" falls under "non-essential travel" at the moment and I'm going to have to leave it there for the time being. Maybe I'll get the ebook instead :-)

[Sam]

I've been reading The Dispossessed for another book group. The main character is a theroretical physicist/mathematician - it's not our maths, as it's set many years in the future in a different planetary system, but there is lots to identify with. It references Einstein in the way that we would reference the ancient Greeks. And it's a really good book! So I'm counting this for my fiction book.

[Jo]

Saw a blog post today that made me think of this prompt.

https://www.rachelneumeier.com/2020/1...