Greg Egan

I am more surpised that the other amateur mathematian appearing in this article is Greg Egan (He has a personal website on https://www.gregegan.net/). He is one of the best contemporary hard SF writers in the world.

Greg Egan and Sam Hughes/qntm are both excellent science fiction authors which I have found other HPMOR fans like. https://www.gregegan.net/ https://qntm.org/fiction

Greg Egan's an impressively good author even though he's writing about the kinds of sci-fi setups that usually come hand-in-hand with bad dialogue and poor characters. I actually think Quarantine is my favorite of his that I've read so far, though the sci-fi parts are less strong than Permutation City, some of it's philosophical aspects about identity feel like they're more immediately relevant. Also take a trip to his website [1] if you haven't yet. [1] https://www.gregegan.net/

In case you missed it, John Baez's collaborator in that post is Greg Egan, who is well known for his brilliant and visionary science fiction. http://www.gregegan.net/

For those of you who aren't familiar with Egan's work, I can't recommend it enough. All good scifi indulges in world-building, but Egan's is the most scientifically well-thought-out I've seen, as well as containing some very plausible depictions of post-humanity. Many of his works are available in their entirety on his (delightfully 90's) website, http://www.gregegan.net.

Here are some authors to try out instead, biased towards Science Fiction - Greg Bear - Amazing science fiction author who builds incredible far future worlds. He is asking questions like "what will humanity be like 10k years in the future". Charles Stross - First off, wonderful characters. His Laundry Files series is like "what is a 1990s geek, complete with a Palm Pilot, worked for a secret government agency that handles occult issues" but over time it gets deeper and the characters get really fleshed out. It is also awesome because you get to see technology move with the time, since the books take place concurrent with our technological progress, so technology like PDAs make way for smart phones. Elizabeth Bear - Just all around great characters. Greg Egan - Science Fiction but deeply rooted in real science and math, his homepage https://www.gregegan.net often dives deeper into the math behind his books and includes citations for further reading! Many of his books lack the "science fiction gadgetry" feel (although some have it) if you are trying to avoid that. Cory Doctorow - He used to be huge in the open source community (not sure, maybe he still is?) his books all explore interesting social issues through the lens of technology driven change. FWIW many people do not like Brandon Sanderson and I avoid recommending his books. IMHO all of the above authors have good characters, Doctorow tends to write younger characters (early to mid 20s), but the rest focus on…

https://www.gregegan.net/ Contact details: [any mailbox] [at] [the domain name of this web site]. Please don’t ask me to give interviews, sign books, appear on podcasts, attend conferences or conventions, or provide feedback or endorsements for works of fiction, scientific theories, or slabs of text disgorged by chatbots. I have no idea how to decipher this obfuscation.

You should definitely also read "Permutation City" by Greg Egan[1] if you haven't already! Amazing book... [1]https://www.gregegan.net/PERMUTATION/Permutation.html

Funnily enough I went into it with a background in math and was surprised about one specific claim that I couldn't quite understand, and it turns out it was subtly incorrect in such a way that it actually adds an interesting twist to the story (Greg Egan acknowledged it). I can't quite find the web page with the discussion (ETA: found it, it's the addendum at the end of the FAQ about the book [0]) but it's about <spoilers>the Garden of Eden configuration of the automaton.</spoilers> ETA: I realize this sounds nitpicky and stickler-y so I just want to point out that I loved the book (and Greg Egan's work in general) and figuring out the automaton stuff was genuinely some of the most fun I've had out of a book. [0] https://www.gregegan.net/PERMUTATION/FAQ/FAQ.html

Except Greg Egan and its hard scifi: https://www.gregegan.net/

> I have read novels written by engineers. More often than not, they are unreadable. They fail to understand why people read (or write). They are an engineer's idea of what a novel should look like. On the other hand: Greg Egan ([1], [2]) is a mathematician and novelist. His novels are sometimes considered to be barely readable (if you are not part of his audience). On the other hand: he does seem to understand why people read his novels - he knows his audience. :-D Readers praise his novels for the worldbuilding (though commonly the story is considered to the weaker side of many of his novels). So I do imagine that such engineers who write novels perfectly know why people read - they just write for a different audience. :-) [1] https://www.gregegan.net/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Egan

My favorite intuitive explanation was actually written by science fiction author, Greg Egan. It takes the exact approach you're asking for, reinterpreting compound interest in a 2d rotational context on the complex plane, and doesn't use more than high school math: https://gregegan.net/FOUNDATIONS/04/found04.html#s2 Fig. 7 is the money shot.

this somehow reminds me of the lovely mermin-peres-magic-square game, beautifully described by mr. greg-egan here : https://www.gregegan.net/SCIENCE/MPMS/MPMS.html

Speaking of Australian adults, public photos, and one (of many) of HN's favourite writers: I am the science fiction writer Greg Egan. There are no photos of me on the web. ~ https://www.gregegan.net/images/GregEgan.htm ~ https://old.reddit.com/r/printSF/comments/5nr5d7/has_anyone_ever_met_g…

Permutation City is briljant - Greg Egan has many (free) stories exploring physics on his website: https://www.gregegan.net/

Time to repost my favourite Greg Egan short, Crystal Nights: https://www.gregegan.net/MISC/CRYSTAL/Crystal.html “What created the only example of consciousness we know of?” Daniel asked. “Evolution.” “Exactly. But I don’t want to wait three billion years, so I need to make the selection process a great deal more refined, and the sources of variation more targeted.” Julie digested this. “You want to try to evolve true AI? Conscious, human-level AI?” “Yes.” Daniel saw her mouth tightening, saw her struggling to measure her words before speaking. “With respect,” she said, “I don’t think you’ve thought that through.”

If you enjoy the 'cute bugs doing science' SF subgenre then his incandescence is definitely worth a look. https://www.gregegan.net/INCANDESCENCE/Incandescence.html

I'll go in to plug the Clockwork Rocket series (Orthogonal and its sequels) and Incandescence, all of which have much more to do with physics and spacetime than Permutation City and short story collections like Instantiation (which I also love). I think Incandescence is my favorite book of the physics set, but the Orthogonal books and their corresponding web notes [1] are an absolute tour de force of deriving a whole universe of physics from a tiny modification to the rules we're familiar with. It was wild to read those as a physics undergrad and still very cool to think about today. [1] -https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/00/PM.html

This is a bit whooosh for my poor head, but very cool to notice that Greg Egan [1] (an SF author definitely represented in my bookshelves) is active in that scene. [1]: https://gregegan.net/

Addendum, for any fans of Greg Egan that didn't know this existed: http://gregegan.net

This is the basis of a major plot point in Greg Egan's novel Quarantine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine_(Egan_novel) Heartily recommend it. sci-fi detective story which asks "what if the Copenhagen interpretation of QM was real?" (note: author acknowledges that it's just a plot device: https://www.gregegan.net/QUARANTINE/QM/QM.html - good writeup, but spoilers).

Greg Egan is an extreme example of math in hard sci-fi. https://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/ORTHOGONAL.html 72 Letters by Ted Chiang is a great short story with a well-developed premise. Maybe not people's typical idea of hard sci-fi, but as a fan of the genre I really enjoyed it. One of his stories became the movie Arrival. Peter Watts is another author whose work I really enjoy. The slideshow you linked reminds me of a fictional presentation he used to have on his website on vampire biology. Can't find it though.

A related interesting problem is superpermutations [1]. This is the same problem that an anonymous 4chan poster helped bring some light to lower bounds on shortest superpatterns [2]. The Google group is worth a shout for their efforts [3]. Surprisingly, we only have optimal superpermutations for really low values on N [4]. I tried my hand at auto-generating symmetric patterns (which turn out to not be optimal after some value of N (6?)), but the problem is quite tough. Currently the best approaches appear to be achieved by using a TSP solver. [1] https://www.gregegan.net/SCIENCE/Superpermutations/Superpermutations.h… [2] https://oeis.org/A180632/a180632.pdf [3] https://groups.google.com/g/superpermutators [4] https://github.com/superpermutators/superperm/tree/master/superpermuta…

I'm sure there's more but the first few that come to mind are Greg Egan's homepage[1], Xenology[2], and on a completely different topic "Gramadach na Gaeilge"[3] (Irish Grammar). [1]: https://gregegan.net [2]: https://xenology.info [3]: http://nualeargais.ie/gnag/gram.htm

Egan's Diaspora also deals with this in some chapter. https://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/15/15.html I don't understand anything in that page but the pictures are great.

Yeah, agreed, the same goes for "dichronauts". Sci fi so hard it cuts diamonds. I read almost everything Egan published. While I love his work dearly, I've had very poor success with introducing people to his "alternative physics" stories (where he takes some law, flips a sign somewhere and rolls with the consequences [])... it's TOO hard. Not everyone likes a sci fi book that requires readers to follow along with pen and paper. So I always first recommend Permutation City, or maybe the short story collections such as "axiomatic"... [] https://www.gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/00/DPDM.html

Thumbs up for Diaspora, that's probably my favorite of his. If anyone wants to sample him first, if you like the short stories on his website, you'll almost certainly like his books. https://www.gregegan.net/BIBLIOGRAPHY/Online.html

If you like hard sci-fi, Greg Egan has a written a few books that cover what life would be like if there were 2 dimensions of time (http://www.gregegan.net/DICHRONAUTS/DICHRONAUTS.html) or if the dimension of time was sumed instead of subtracted when measuring distance (http://www.gregegan.net/ORTHOGONAL/ORTHOGONAL.html) It's amazing to think how the universe is ruled by such minute details.

The first chapter of Diaspora is available on the author's website, I'd highly recommend reading it: https://www.gregegan.net/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html

Permutation City is one of Greg Egan’s better-known works, and I strongly suggest you look into the rest of his ouevre which (aside from his Orthogonal trilogy) tends to be of a consistently high standard. https://www.gregegan.net