Roger Penrose, math rockstar, who later in life began to write longer and longer works. In new areas. Ever read any of his stuff?
I never did. I did read Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, and the plot contains tiling problems, quite clearly modeled on the idea of Penrose being a bad-ass math person. Anathem‘s the kind of work which makes fans create wikis about it. They want to stay in that land. I felt that the story about the “mathic world” was the strongest one in the book, and I was a little put off when the plot began to move (at the latter half of this brick of a book).
At FSCONS, someone made a simile with monastic life and working with the Open Source Ecology project. Kyrah whispered “Did you read Anathem, yet?” I nodded. A moment of geek-to-geek friendship.