Strage Horizons is a fantastic speculative fiction publication. They're considered a professional market and pay their authors at professional rates. The archives are worth checking out. Clarkesworld is another similar publication and has won the Hugo award for best semi-pro zine two years in a row (<a href="http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/" rel="nofollow">http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/</a>). If you enjoy this type of writing, support these places! They're run by small communities and often do quite a bit of independent publishing.
Only bleem is not the secret integer between 3 an 4 but the smallest real number greater than zero. Yes, I know real analysis and all about supremum and coverings and epsilons and all the other ways to hide its existence. John Conway gets close in "On Numbers and Games" (there is some of the secret in non-standard analysis) but the conspiracy pushed him off into knot theory when he got too close... Still if you drop the real number line from (0,1) something has to hit the ground first. Bleem.
Apparently it has been made into a film (12 minutes, mind you):<p><a href="http://secretnumber.colinlevy.com/" rel="nofollow">http://secretnumber.colinlevy.com/</a>
That's a great short story. It reminds me of the movie Pi, in which a man obsessively searches for a secret number, to the point of debilitating paranoia. If you enjoyed this short story even slightly, then I highly recommend watching Pi.
Very cool short story. One of the lessons I got from it is that you should never consider somebody crazy for having a crazy idea. Some of our most brilliant scientists, mathematicians, entrepreneurs, etc have been called crazy fools for having radical ideas (That ended up being right). Our society needs radical thinkers to shake things up, and revolutionize the world. Next time somebody tells you about their own "bleem" just consider it, and don't throw them to the street as a heretic.
The "applied" number theory reminds me of a couple other stories:<p>-the Laundry novels (Charlie Stross). Here's one novella: <a href="http://www.goldengryphon.com/Stross-Concrete.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.goldengryphon.com/Stross-Concrete.html</a><p>-Luminous/Dark Integers (Greg Egan).
Greg Egan has written a couple of less-jokey stories that deal with a related idea (that is more plausible).<p>The first story is "Luminous" from 1995, but I don't have a link to a free copy.<p>The second is "Dark Integers" which you can find here: <a href="http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0805/DarkINtegers.shtml" rel="nofollow">http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0805/DarkINtegers.shtml</a>
This reminds me of a short story I read when I was a kid, where a guy discovered a shape with zero sides. I think at the end he made his boss disappear by folding him into the shape.
I thought 137 was the secret number? Feynman, Heisenberg, Weisskopf and Pauli were intrigued by it.<p><a href="http://www.1377731.com/137/" rel="nofollow">http://www.1377731.com/137/</a>
Anyone that liked that story should pick up a copy of Mathenauts - an anthology of Mathematics themed short stories put together by Rudy Rucker. Many of the stories have a similar feel to that one. You can find it on Amazon here: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mathenauts-Mathematical-Wonder-Rudy-Rucker/dp/0877958904" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Mathenauts-Mathematical-Wonder-Rudy-Ru...</a>
Reminds me a bit of something I wrote a few years ago: <a href="https://md401.homelinux.net/fiction/sample%20%2327.html" rel="nofollow">https://md401.homelinux.net/fiction/sample%20%2327.html</a>
This looks like a fun list too of math movies: <a href="http://www.qedcat.com/moviemath/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.qedcat.com/moviemath/index.html</a>
As I was reading I imagined at the end Dr. Tomlin back home found the bag of jelly beans he emptied onto the table still in his pocket only he would find one jelly bean still in it.