Fantasia Mathematica

Fantasia Mathematica ^[1] is an anthology published in 1958 containing stories, humor, poems, etc., all on mathematical topics, compiled by Clifton Fadiman. A companion volume was published as The Mathematical Magpie (1962). The volume contains writing by authors including Robert Heinlein, Aldous Huxley, H. G. Wells, and Martin Gardner.

Contents

• "Introduction" by Clifton Fadiman

Odd Numbers

• "Young Archimedes" by Aldous Huxley
• "Pythagoras and the Psychoanalyst" by Arthur Koestler
• "Mother and the Decimal Point" by Richard Llewellyn
• "Jurgen Proves It by Mathematics" by James Branch Cabell
• "Peter Learns Arithmetic" by H. G. Wells
• "Socrates and the Slave" by Plato
• "The Death of Archimedes" by Karel Čapek

Imaginaries

• "The Devil and Simon Flagg" by Arthur Porges
• "—And He Built a Crooked House" by Robert A. Heinlein
• "Inflexible Logic" by Russell Maloney
• "No-Sided Professor" by Martin Gardner
• "Superiority" by Arthur C. Clarke
• "The Mathematical Voodoo" by H. Nearing, Jr.
• "Expedition" by Fredric Brown
• "The Captured Cross-Section" by Miles J. Breuer, M.D.
• "A. Botts and the Moebius Strip" by William Hazlett Upson
• "God and the Machine" by Nigel Balchin
• "The Tachypomp" by Edward Page Mitchell
• "The Island of Five Colors" by Martin Gardner
• "The Last Magician" by Bruce Elliott
• "A Subway Named Moebius" by A. J. Deutsch
• "The Universal Library" by Kurd Lasswitz
• "Postscript to "The Universal Library"" by Willy Ley
• "John Jones's Dollar" by Harry Stephen Keeler

Fractions

• "A New Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens" by Arthur T. Quiller-Couch
• "The Unfortunate Topologist" by Cyril Kornbluth
• "There Once Was a Breathy Baboon" by Sir Arthur Eddington
• "Yet What Are All..." by Lewis Carroll
• "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" by Ralph Barton
• "Mathematical Love" by Andrew Marvell
• "The Circle" by Christopher Morley
• "The Circle and the Square" by Thomas Dekker
• "Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare" by Edna St. Vincent Millay
• "Euclid" by Vachel Lindsay
• "To Think That Two and Two Are Four" by A. E. Housman
• "The Uses of Mathematics" by Samuel Butler
• "Arithmetic" by Carl Sandburg
• "Threes (To Be Sung By Niels Bohr)" by John Atherton
• "Plane Geometry" by Emma Rounds
• "He Thought He Saw Electrons Swift" by Herbert Dingle
• "Fearsome Fable" by Bruce Elliott
• "Bertrand Russell's Dream" by G. H. Hardy
• "For All Practical Purposes" by C. Stanley Ogilvy
• "Eternity: A Nightmare" by Lewis Carroll
• "An Infinity of Guests" by George Gamow
• "∞" by Sir Arthur Eddington
• "No Power on Earth" by William Whewell
• "(x + 1)" by Edgar Allan Poe
• "The Receptive Bosom" by Edward Shanks
• "Leinbach's Proof" by Arthur Schnitzler
• "Problem from The New Yorker: "Talk of the Town""
• "A Letter to Tennyson from Mathematical Gazette"
• "A Fable from Mathematical Gazette"
• "There Was a Young Man from Trinity" by Anonymous
• "There Was an Old Man Who Said, "Do"" by Anonymous
• "Relativity" by Anonymous
• "There Was a Young Fellow Named Fisk" by Anonymous

References