Mathematical Fiction

Mathematical fiction is a genre of creative fictional work in which mathematics and mathematicians play important roles, spanning poems, short stories, novels, plays, comic books, films, videos and audio works regardless of form or medium. One of its earliest and most studied examples is Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, an 1884 satirical novella by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott; mathematical fiction may have existed since ancient times, but it has only recently been recognized as a genre of literature, and it has since attracted both a growing body of work and a growing readership, with Flatland itself producing the twentieth-century sequel Sphereland and the twenty-first-century sequel Flatterland, both by Ian Stewart.