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"The Library of Babel" was originally written by Borges in 1941, [3] based on an earlier essay he had published in 1939 while working as a librarian. [4] It concerns a fictional library containing every possible book of a certain fixed length, over a 25-symbol alphabet (which, including spacing and punctuation, is sufficient for the Spanish language). [5]
Mathematical folklore can also refer to the unusual (and possibly apocryphal) stories or jokes involving mathematicians or mathematics that are told verbally in mathematics departments. Compilations include tales collected in G. H. Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology and (Krantz 2002); examples include: Srinivasa Ramanujan's taxicab numbers.
Mathematical fiction is a genre of creative fictional work in which mathematics and mathematicians play important roles. The form and the medium of the works are not important. The genre may include poems, short stories, novels or plays; comic books; films, videos, or audios.
"The Library of Babel" (Spanish: La biblioteca de Babel) is a short story by Argentine author and librarian Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), conceiving of a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format and character set.
Borges in 1967. Jorge Luis Borges and mathematics concerns several modern mathematical concepts found in certain essays and short stories of Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), including concepts such as set theory, recursion, chaos theory, and infinite sequences, [1] although Borges' strongest links to mathematics are through Georg Cantor's theory of infinite sets, outlined in ...
The problem became notorious when American novelist and short story writer Ben Ames Williams modified an older problem and included it in a story, "Coconuts", in the October 9, 1926, issue of the Saturday Evening Post. [2] Here is how the problem was stated by Williams [3] (condensed and paraphrased): Five men and a monkey were shipwrecked on ...
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is a satirical novella by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott, first published in 1884 by Seeley & Co. of London. Written pseudonymously by "A Square", [1] the book used the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland to comment on the hierarchy of Victorian culture, but the novella's more enduring contribution is its examination of dimensions.
These mathematical fiction novels and other fiction books have some elements of mathematics, or feature real or fictional mathematicians. Frequently these books use narrative devices to explore mathematical topics.