Mathematicians in Love, a Novel by Rudy Rucker

A wild, funny tale. Crazy mathematicians compete for the love of two women across space, time and logic.

Berkeley grad students Bela Kis and Paul Bridge have discovered the mathematical underpinnings of ultimate reality. But then they begin fighting over the beguiling video-blogger, Alma Ziff.

First Bela gets Alma’s interest by starting the wildest rock band ever. But then Paul undertakes the ultimate computer hack: altering reality to make Alma his. The change brings more than he bargained for: Alma is swept away into a higher world of mathematician cockroaches and cone shells bent upon using our world as an experimental set-up for deciding an arcane point of metamathematics.

It’s up to Bela to bring Alma back, repair reality, stop the aliens, and, most important of all, discover the true meaning of love.

Blurbs

"Rudy Rucker should be declared a National Treasure of American Science Fiction. Someone simultaneously channeling Kurt Gödel and Lenny Bruce might start to approximate full-on Ruckerian warp-space, but without the sweet, human, splendidly goofy Rudy-ness at the core of the singularity."
--- William Gibson, author of Pattern Recognition

"What a Dickensian genius Rucker has for Californian characters, as if, say, Dickens had fused with Phil Dick and taken up surfing and jamming and topologising. He has a hotline to cosmic revelations yet he's always here and now in the groove, tossing off lines of beauty and comic wisdom. 'My heart is a dog running after every cat.' We really feel with his characters in their bizarre tragicomic quests."
--- Ian Watson, author of The Great Escape

"Rudy Rucker is the most consistently brilliant imagination working in SF today"
--- Charles Stross, author of Accelerando

"For sheer gonzo inventiveness, trust Rucker and this gut-wrenching, near-ftl-speed intellectual adventure. And trust me, too: You won't read another sf work all year this much mind-bending, synapse-tingling fun."
--- Michael Bishop, author of Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas

"This may well be Rudy Rucker's best novel --- funny, wise, fast and inventive. A real advance."
--- Gregory Benford, author of The Sunborn

"Rudy Rucker writes like the love child of Philip K. Dick and George Carlin. Brilliant, frantic, conceptual, cosmological . . . like lucid dreaming, only funny. This book rocks!"
---Walter John Williams, author of Dread Empire's Fall

"Rudy Rucker never fails to leave me breathless. . . Reading one of his stories is like a reset button on reality: when it's over, the whole universe looks slightly different...and much stranger."
--Spider Robinson, author of Night of Power

Reviews

Rucker cleverly pulls off a romantic comedy about mathematicians in love. This excursion into alternative versions of Berkeley, Calif., is full of quirky, charming life-forms human and otherwise and ruled by a god who's the female jellyfish-creator of Earth. All this seethes around Bela Kis; Bela's roommate, Paul Bridge; and Bela's girlfriend, Alma Ziff, who ping-pongs between them in a sometimes acute, sometimes obtuse love triangle. Bela and Paul struggle for their Ph.D.s under mad math genius Roland Haut by inventing a paracomputer "Gobubble" that predicts future events. ... Rucker's wild characters, off-the-wall situations and wicked political riffs prove that writing SF spoofs, like Bela's rock music avocation, "beats the hell out of publishing a math paper."
--- Publisher's Weekly

In Mathematicians in Love Rucker has created a love story wrapped up in a cross-cultural mystery tour that could only have happened inside the mind of a crazy mathemetician. Buy a ticket. It's well worth the price. It allows you to immerse yourself in math lingo as cool and arcane as anything jazz musicians could come up with and feel knowledgeable, even though it's all so much mumbo jumbo. Somehow, when Rucker's characters talk about the nature of the universe (or the curve of a yellow bikini) in terms of fractals, curved planes and number theory, it all seems totally, intense, relevant and hip. Which would be a pretty good description of the author.
--- SFRevu

Rucker ... is palpably and quiveringly tuned in to the zeitgeist and can offer cultural and scientific commentary and satire better than almost any other SF author practicing today. And if, as some have it, SF always speaks of the present, no matter what era it's set in, then Rucker has just cut straight to the chase this time, nevertheless retaining all the glorious weirdness that comes with more futuristic milieus.
--- SciFi.com

Mathematicians in Love ... percolates with off-the-wall characters and trippy extra-dimensional shenanigans. Nobody writes math-based science fiction like Rudy Rucker does. He keeps the tone light and the action playful, even as his characters grapple with the meaning of tragedy and the ultimate mechanics of the universe. A definite high point in Rucker's singular writing career.
--- San Francisco Chronicle

All the pleasures of a Rucker novel come forth abundantly: playfully weird higher physics and math; bizarre conceptual psychedelia; distincively Calfornian counter-cultural comedy; zany romance; doppelgangers; generally happy endings. ... Mathematicians in Love is an egaging and entertaining book, light yet thought-provoking, funny yet of some gravity. It deserves success.
--- Locus

Rucker's Writing Notes for Mathematicians in Love

Access the 2.5 Meg PDF file mathlovenotesposted.pdf, a 203 page document containing the working notes for the book. The file is large because it includes a number of drawings. You can save a copy to your local machine, although copyright of the notes is (C) Rudy Rucker 2006, and all further rights are reserved.

Mathematicians in Love

Contents of the Site

Summary

Blurbs

Reviews

Rucker's Writing Notes for Mathematicians in Love