Fantasia Mathematica

Fantasia Mathematica 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
 * "The 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