Mathenauts
American Short stories, American fiction, American Science fiction, Mathematics, Mathematicians
Rudy Rucker, Isaac Asimov, Norman Kagan, Greg Bear, Ruth Berman, Anatoly Dnieprov, Martin Gardner, Ian Watson, Kathryn Cramer, George Zebrowski, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Don Sakers, Larry Niven, William F. Orr, Marc Laidlaw, Robert Sheckley, Henry Gross, Frederik Pohl, Gregory Benford
Rudolf "Rudy" von Bitter Rucker is a writer and a mathematician who worked for twenty years as a Silicon Valley computer science professor, and published a number of software packages.

Rucker is regarded as contemporary master of science-fiction, and received the Philip K. Dick award twice. His forty published books include novels, collections, and non-fiction books on the fourth dimension, infinity, and the meaning of computation.

A founder of the cyberpunk school of science-fiction, Rucker also writes SF in a realistic style known as transrealism. His 2006 *Mathematicians in Love* was an example of a transreal novel. His early cyberpunk four-book series was republished in 2010 as *The Ware Tetralogy*.

Rucker’s 2007 novel, *Postsingular* was something of a return to the cyberpunk style, as was the 2009 sequel, *Hylozoic*, in which every object on Earth comes to life. Rucker’s autobiography, *Nested Scrolls*, appeared in 2011. Recent novels include *Turing & Burroughs*, *Return to the Hollow Earth*, and *Million Mile Road Trip*.

[(Source)][1]

  [1]: https://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/about/ || Asimov was born sometime between October 4, 1919 and January 2, 1920 in Petrovichi in Smolensk Oblast, RSFSR (now Russia), the son of a Jewish family of millers.  Although his exact date of birth is uncertain, Asimov himself celebrated it on January 2.  His family emigrated to Brooklyn, New York and opened a candy store when he was three years old.  He taught himself to read at the age of five. He began reading the science fiction pulp magazines that his family's store carried. Around the age of eleven, he began to write his own stories, and by age nineteen, he was selling them to the science fiction magazines. He graduated from Columbia University in 1939. He married Gertrude Blugerman in 1942.  During World War II he worked as a civilian at the Philadelphia Navy Yard's Naval Air Experimental Station.  After the war, he returned to Columbia University and earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1948.  He then joined the faculty of the Boston University School of Medicine until 1958, when he became a full-time writer. His first novel, [Pebble in the Sky](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL46402W), was published in 1950. He and his wife divorced in 1973, and he married Janet O. Jeppson the same year. He was a highly prolific writer, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 9,000 letters and postcards. || Gregory Dale Bear (born August 20, 1951) is an American writer and illustrator best known for science fiction. His work has covered themes of galactic conflict (Forge of God books), artificial universes (The Way series), consciousness and cultural practices (Queen of Angels), and accelerated evolution (Blood Music, Darwin's Radio, and Darwin's Children). His most recent work is the 2021 novel The Unfinished Land. Greg Bear has written over 50 books in total. Greg Bear was also one of the five co-founders of the San Diego Comic-Con. [source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greg_Bear) || Martin Gardner was an American popular mathematics and popular science writer with interests also encompassing scientific skepticism, micromagic, philosophy, religion, and literature – especially the writings of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and G. K. Chesterton. He was also a leading authority on Lewis Carroll. *-- Wikipedia* || Kathryn Elizabeth Cramer (born April 16, 1962) is an American science fiction writer, editor, and literary critic. 

**Source**: [Kathryn Cramer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_Cramer) on Wikipedia. || George Zebrowski (born December 28, 1945) is an American science fiction author and editor who has written and edited a number of books, and is a former editor of The Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He lives with author Pamela Sargent, with whom he has co-written a number of novels, including Star Trek novels.

Zebrowski won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1999 for his novel Brute Orbits. Three of his short stories, "Heathen God," "The Eichmann Variations," and "Wound the Wind," have been nominated for the Nebula Award, and "The Idea Trap" was nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon Award. || Douglas Hofstadter is an American scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics. His 1979 book *Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid* won both the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and a National Book Award for Science. His 2007 book *I Am a Strange Loop* won the *Los Angeles Times* Book Prize for Science and Technology.—*Wikipedia* 2021-03-03 || Laurence van Cott Niven — known as Larry Niven — is an American science fiction writer. His best-known work is Ringworld (1970), which received Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards. The Science Fiction Writers of America named him the 2015 recipient of the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award. His work is primarily hard science fiction, using big science concepts and theoretical physics. It also often includes elements of detective fiction and adventure stories. His fantasy includes the series The Magic Goes Away, rational fantasy dealing with magic as a non-renewable resource.

Niven was born in Los Angeles. He briefly attended the California Institute of Technology and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics (with a minor in psychology) from Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas, in 1962. He did a year of graduate work in mathematics at the University of California at Los Angeles. On September 6, 1969, he married Marilyn Joyce "Fuzzy Pink" Wisowaty, a science fiction and Regency literature fan. He is an agnostic.

Source: Wikipedia || Robert Sheckley (July 16, 1928 – December 9, 2005) was an American writer. First published in the science-fiction magazines of the 1950s, his many quick-witted stories and novels were famously unpredictable, absurdist, and broadly comical.

Nominated for Hugo and Nebula Awards, Sheckley was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2001. || Frederik Pohl, Jr. was born in Brooklyn, New York.  His father held a number of jobs, and his family moved many times in his childhood before settling in Brooklyn when he was about seven.  He attended Brooklyn Tech high school, but dropped out and took a job to help support his family.  As a teen, he founded the New York science fiction writer's group The Futurians.  His first publication, a poem, appeared in Amazing Stories in 1937, when he was 18 years old.  In 1936, he joined the Young Communist League and became President of the Brooklyn branch, but he left it in 1939 after Stalin-Hitler pact.  In 1939, at the age of 21, he was editor of both Super Science Stories and Astonishing Stories, and regularly published his own stories in both of them.  He married his first wife in 1940.  In 1943 both the magazines he was editing folded, and he worked as a literary agent.  During World War II, he served with the Army Air Corps from 1945-1945.  He divorced his first wife during this period and married his second wife in 1945.  In 1948 he married his third wife, Judith Merril, who he divorced in 1953, the same year he married his fourth wife, Carol Metcal Ulf.

In the early 1950s his literary agency business failed and he returned to editing as an assistant editor at Galaxy Science Fiction and later also if Magazine.  In 1966, 1967, and 1968 his magazines won Hugo Awards for Best Professional Magazines.  In the 1970s he acquired and edited novels for the "Frederik Pohl Selections" series of Bantam Books.  He also began to emerge as a novel writer, and went on to win Nebula awards for fiction in 1976 and 1977 and the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1978.  He married his current wife, science fiction editor and academic Elizabeth Anne Hull, PhD, in 1984.  He continues to write from his home in Palatine, Illinois. || Gregory Benford (Gregory Albert Benford) is an astrophysicist and science fiction author who is on the faculty of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine.  He is also a contributing editor of Reason magazine.  Benford is best known for the Galactic Center Saga novels, a series that postulates a galaxy in which sentient organic life is in constant warfare with sentient electromechanical life.

Greg was born in Mobile, Alabama.  He received his Bachelor of Science in Physics from the University of Oklahoma, followed by his Masters and then his Doctorate from the University of California, San Diego.  Having published more than 200 scientific papers, his research encompasses both theory and experiments in the fields of astrophysics and plasma physics.

Greg is a two-time winner of the Nebula Award and has also won the John W. Campbell Award, the Australian Ditmar Award, the Lord Foundation Prize, and the 1990 United Nations Medal in Literature.  

Source: Secular Policy Institute