Mathematical Fiction

I loved Chaos in Wonderland: Visual Adventures in a Fractal World by Clifford Pickover. It does for chaos theory and fractals what Flatland did for geometry and dimensions. Beautiful pictures and theory that goes down so easy all wrapped around an adolescent fantasy of a plot. Sorta like Jonathan Swift for the unique computational set (pun intended.)

I was surprised not to see The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle. It had a nifty (and simple) calculus proof that everybody could understand. The ingeneous reckoning concerned a dark cloud that was blotting out more and more of the stars in the sky. Basically, the black spot (a circle) in the sky was getting larger as a series of concentric circles (the circles all had the same center and were getting bigger.) This meant that the cloud was headed straight towards Earth. Think of how a basketball looks if it is coming straight at your face: small circle, larger circle, largest circle, POW! The same thing would apply for an American football headed STRAIGHT for your face (spinning on its long axis, like it does when a quarterback throws it.) If the football is thrown at an angle where it won't hit your face then you are able to see its non-spherical shape as you get a better and better angle on it.

The characters determined that the cloud may or may not have been spherical, they couldn't tell because it was heading directly towards the Earth. What they wanted to figure out was: When would it get here? One of the characters showed that it didn't matter whether or not the cloud was small, relatively near the Earth and traveling slowly OR if it was very large, far away from the Earth and traveling at a tremendous speed; the cloud would arrive in two weeks. Think about what it would take for a beachball thrown at your head to "look" the same as a baseball thrown at your head. It would have to start farther away from your face and be traveling faster so that the silhouette of the two balls would be equal in size at every time increment. Right up until both blot out the sky and smash you on the nose.

It was a simple, cool proof (again, anyone could understand it) and a clever plot device to create a deadline combined with fear and uncertainty about how large (and dense) this thing would be when it got here.

Fred Hoyle and John Eliot wrote several "Andromeda" books together that presaged the intellectual conceit that underlay the Species movies. Hoyle was also an astronomer in real life.

I'll bet there are dozens of said references in the TV show Futurama.

Sweet! I made my own list of ones from there I've seen. Great ideas for future reads as well - I can't believe I haven't gotten to _Dirk Gently's_ yet!