Borges and Mathematical Fiction
I think Jorge Luis Borges' fiction is growing on me. I still find the stories don't work well as stories, but the images behind them — labyrinths, mirrors, dreams, and infinity — are really compelling. Like M.C. Escher, he conveys a mathematical sensibility without ever invoking math.
One story, "The Library of Babel," flirts enough with combinatorics and topology to earn a spot in Alex Kasman's Mathematical Fiction database. Kasman, a math professor at South Carolina's College of Charleston, has collected 469 novels, stories, plays, and scripts touching everything from number theory to trigonometry.
Twenty-three of these works are available for free online, from Poe's "The Purloined Letter" to Cory Doctorow's "The Rapture of the Nerds." "Mathematicians should be interested in these works of 'mathematical fiction' even if we do not enjoy them," Kasman writes, "because they both affect and reflect the non-mathematician's view of this subject."
One thing I'm coming to like about Borges is that he wrote only stories, essays, and poems, no longer works. I suppose that's in keeping with their dreamlike quality, but I also appreciate it as a reader. Short is good.
