Recommendations for Cypherpunks Books

Tim May tcmay at got.net
Mon Jan 22 00:10:45 PST 2001


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 at 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





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