At 1:07 AM -0500 1/22/01, dmolnar wrote:
On Sun, 21 Jan 2001, Wei Dai wrote:
It's strange that there are so few science fiction books that talk about cryptography at all, except maybe at a very low level of detail and sophistication. The only book I can remember that even mentions public-key
It's also strange that there are relatively few science fiction books which talk about math. There are some noted short story collections (_The Mathematical Magpie_ and its sequel), short stories (Asimov's story about rediscovering "graphitics," Heinlein's "And He Built A Crooked House"), and authors (Rudy Rucker), but nowhere near the volume of SF based on physics.
Erik Nylund has at least two novels which are centered around mathematics: "Signal to Noise" and "A Signal Shattered." The novels by Zindell which I mentioned this morning are also mathcentric. A collection of math SF and fantasy stories I read as a kid had a big influence on me. I don't recall the name of the collection, but it included some of Arthur C. Clarke's "Tales from the White Hart" stories involving a Moebius strip wall, for example. And a story about the Devil making a bet with a mathematician, and the bet involves Fermat's Last Theorem. The Devil ends up being hooked by the problem. There's a good reason more SF stories are centered around physics. Reductionism aside, hysics is what gives us space ships, interstellar travel, colonies on other worlds, etc. The stories centered around math tend to be "gimmicky," like the "And He Built a Crooked House" story Dave mentions. And most of the "physics" in most SF novels is of the most simplistic sort, e.g., nuclear reactors (in some old 40s stories), hyperspace (with the hoary "imagine two dots on this handkerchief" explanations such as we find in "Starman Jones" and dozens of other such novels). (And this handkerchief explanation of "jumps" is really more akin to Riemannian geometry and topology than to actual physics, so it arguably qualifies as "math." Most of the physics is gotten through in a couple of paragraphs. Probably about the same coverage math gets. But the artifacts created with physics tend to be central players in novels and stories--being the space ships and lunar colonies and the like--and so the impression is natural that physics plays a larger role than math in SF. Heinlein frequently threw in references to tensor calculus, log tables, slipsticks, etc. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns