Mathematics In Science Fiction

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Assignment on Mathematics in Science Fiction Submitted to: Jai Singh Submitted by: Nizar Ahammed C M Roll No: H/ 1675 Mathematics in Science Fiction Science fiction can be defined as a fantasy fiction designed to appeal those with a knowledge and interest in science. The typical reader of science fiction may consider traditional realistic fictions as a bit of boredom. These same readers hold good knowledge about the science which makes them to contemplate about the scientific possibilities prescribed in the literary text. Many of the scientific fictions, explicitly or implicitly, throw some lights upon the genre called ‘mathematics’. In other words all the science fiction on this earth would contain the mathematics. Many books contain references…show more content…
A simple use of mathematics is to show the high rate of intelligence of the characters, a mathematical theory may be used as plot-development as Dan Brown did in The Da Vinci Code. Mathematics is used as a standard for reasoning; characters in the literary works are brilliant thinkers if they know mathematics, even they hold antagonist roles in the text. Rarely mathematicians are considered as foolishness as Jonathan Swift says about mathematicians in Laputa even though they ruled the country and achieved the supremacy over the subjects. Mathematicians may be inserted into fictional narratives to enhance historical plausibility. Neal Stephenson includes Alan Turing in his novel Cryptomomicon. David Leavit’s recent novel the Indian clerk, based on episodes in the life of the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, includes Betranda Russell, George Hardy, and panoply of Cambridge University scholars. Mathematics in Science Fiction The imaginations of pure mathematicians have provided science fiction writers with important motifs. The notions taken from geometry and topology of a fourth and other Dimensions have the essential qualities of strangeness and mystery, making them an enjoyable struggle for the untrained intuition to…show more content…
A favourite mathematical subject of science-fiction writers has produced enough stories to define a genre: topological fiction, where ‘toopology’ refers to the study of continuous deformation of shapes in space. Robert Heinlein’s ‘And He Built a Crooked House,’ published in 1940.The writers have set stories in frankly imaginary worlds for the sake of unusual topological structures of space, but few have been so careful to define the structures as Heinlein was. It is common for the topological oddity to be revealed only at the last, as a shocking ending, as in ‘Traveller’s Rest’- though this is only is one element of a subtle and complex story in which the structures of time and language undergo variations related to that structure of space. Christopher Priest’s Inverted World, published in 1974, features a hyperboloid world where variations of subjective experience take place according to one’s position in the world. Topology is also likely to be abused as a catch-all explanation for any weird happening in ‘A Subway Named Mobius by A J Deutsch, it is supposed that a subway network has become so complex that trains mysteriously disappear and reappear, although no proper topological explanation is

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