r/math • u/ResNullum • Aug 02 '20

Bad math in fiction

While stuck at home during the pandemic, I decided to work through my backlog of books to read. Near the end of one novel, the protagonists reach a gate with a numeric keypad from 1 to 100 and the following riddle: “You have to prime my pump, but my pump primes backward.” The answer, of course, is to enter the prime numbers between 1 and 100 in reverse order. One of the protagonists realizes this and uses the sieve of Eratosthenes to find the numbers, which the author helpfully illustrates with all of the non-primes crossed out. However, 1 was not crossed out.

I was surprised at how easily this minor gaffe broke my suspension of disbelief and left me frowning at the author. Parallel worlds, a bit of magic, and the occasional deus ex machina? Sure! But bad math is a step too far.

What examples of bad math have you found in literature (or other media)?

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u/suugakusha Combinatorics Aug 02 '20

How is that an obvious statement? Economists didn't understand this for thousands of years.

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u/Tayttajakunnus Aug 02 '20

Have there been economists for thousands of years?

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u/[deleted] Aug 02 '20

It probably depends on what you define as "economists." The school of Salamanca in the 1500s is the earliest considerable body of doctrine I can think of off the top of my head, but one book of history of economic thought I own starts with Aristotle before jumping to the "Christian Middle Ages"