Dan, I remember reading "Uncle Petros and Goldbach's conjecture" quite a while ago, and found it enjoyable. But, quite honestly, after all this time I don't remember any details. Here's a review by Allyn Jackson: http://www.ams.org/notices/200010/rev-jackson.pdf Victor On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 8:39 PM, Dan Asimov <dasimov@earthlink.net> wrote:
Okay, maybe it was "wrong". (But only with quotation marks.)
I wanted so much to like "Numbers", but was put off by the large amount of gunplay.
But as long as we're on the subject, are there any books or short stories involving math that math-fungi have liked?
(Let's exclude the wonderful but well-known Mathematica Fantasia and Mathematical Magpie collections.)
--Dan
On 2013-10-04, at 5:07 PM, Hilarie Orman wrote:
Hmmm, I thought it was far enough off to qualify as "wrong".
"Numbers" used to do a pretty good job on blackboard math, I thought. But I think that there is a difference between absolute accuracy and conveying an effective impression. What drives me nuts is actors playing string instruments (that is, instruments with vibrating strings, not instruments constructed from strings, not even in theory). You cannot fake bowing or fingering.
Yesterday there was an episode of the TV show "Elementary" (as you probably guessed, yet another Sherlock Holmes show), in which the mystery to solve was the murder of an eminent mathematician. And the whole show revolved around the putative solution to the P = NP question.
There wasn't much actual math on the show, of course, but at least when one character explained what P = NP meant to another character, it was fairly close to accurate.
There were plenty of blackboards filled with what was supposed to be actual math, but they never resembled actual blackboards filled with actual math. I wonder why they can never get that right.
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