Literature / Writers Cannot Do Math

Bad mathematics in literature.

The 14th century English monks of Crowland Abbey successfully fended off another abbey's attempt to acquire some of their landholdings in court, presenting as evidence a large book alleged to document their historical claims to the property. Apparently the Crowland monks had succumbed to temptation, and to this trope, because the book has since been recognized as a fraud, not least because some of the senior monks mentioned in its history were alleged to have served at the monastery for as long as 148 years.
Quentin Compson's age in Absalom, Absalom! From The Sound and the Fury, we know that he commits suicide in 1910. So when Rosa Coldfield first tells him the story, shortly before he goes to Harvard, the year must be 1909. The narration says that Quentin is 20 at the time. But in the appendix, there's a timeline with the birth and death dates of major characters, which says that Quentin was born in 1891 (and corroborates the date of 1910 for his death). For his roommate, we get the birth year of 1890. "Shreve was nineteen," the narration says (which is possible), "a little younger than Quentin" (which is not).
Adrian Mole provides an in-universe example, in that our hero who fancies himself as a great writer cannot do maths.
I could save £75 a week. In a year, that is... Thank God for calculators. Nine hundred pounds!
The Adventures of Archie Reynolds throws out lots of numbers, measuring the number of minutes that an action was performed, the exact size of something, etc. However, the numbers don't add up. Characters have celebrations that last minutes or even hours, characters stand around and watch people for minutes instead of seconds, and objects are sized very oddly.
Most of the times and dates discussed in Around the World in Eighty Days add up just fine. But in the first chapter, when Mr. Fogg asks Passepartout what time it is, he says it's twenty-two minutes after eleven. Mr. Fogg says that he is four minutes too slow—it is, in fact, twenty-nine minutes after eleven. Where did the other three minutes go?
In Artemis Fowl the titular character's bodyguard, Butler stands at almost seven feet tall, has "a barrel chest full of scars and hard muscle", hands that are "the size and approximate shape of spades", and is frequently referred to as a "man mountain" by other characters. However, in The Eternity Code he's described as a "ninety kilo [200 lb] dead weight." For comparison to a real giant muscular person, Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson is 6 foot 9 inches and his weight is listed at 180–200 kg (400-440 lbs). In order to be 90 kg at a similar height, a person would be fairly thin, being closer to underweight than massively muscular.
The Babysitters Club: The number of bedrooms in Watson's house never seems to add up. Kristy says his house has 9 bedrooms, which should mean one each for Watson and Elizabeth, Kristy, Sam, Charlie, David Michael, Karen, Andrew, Emily Michelle and Nannie. However, in another book Kristy says that each of her brothers could have a whole suite of rooms if they wanted, and occasionally they've had entire families stay over with no discussion of people moving or sharing rooms. However, possibly the "9 bedrooms" refers only to the bedrooms on the first and second floors. It's mentioned that there is a third floor and an attic that are never used (which is most certainly not because the ghost of Ben Brewer haunts them), so her brothers could have suites, but would have to move to the upper floors.
In the Bone Chillers book blowtorch@psycho.com, main character Jason is a leapling, born on February 29. Multiple characters, Jason included, mention how Jason's "lucky thirteenth" birthday is in a leap year, so he could celebrate on his actual birthday. Apparently, no one in this book has any idea how a calendar works; a leap year occurs every four years, so a leapling's thirteenth birthday would fall in a common year.
Brandon Sanderson has admitted to being bad at math, so he employs a "continuity editor" whose job it is to make all the numbers, particularly dates and timelines, come out right in his books.
There's a children's book titled Brog The Stoop in which the race of Stoops are restricted to one child per family. The author really should have noticed that this would lead them to die out very quickly, each generation being at most half the size of the previous one.
In The Camp Half-Blood Series, Nico di Angelo is 12 at the end of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, but 14 in The Heroes of Olympus, set less than a year later. His age gap with Percy also narrows from 3 1/2 years to 2 1/2.
An Older Than Print aversion in The Canterbury Tales in which the Host (correctly) guesses the height of the sun based on the height of a tree and the length of its shadow.
If you look at the family tree in the last chapter of Centennial, you'll notice that Prudence Wolf (1866-1936) was the mother of Pale Star Zendt (1874-1939).
In Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, there are 150 people in the Transport Capsule. Twenty-four are eaten by Knids, and the letter at the end says there are 136 left. This should be 126.
Though details of character ages are mostly left vague in The Chronicles of Magravandias, there are clues. And those clues don't always line up with the explicitly stated ages.
- At one point Almorante is stated to be thirty-six. Context clues would put his younger brother Bayard at thirty-five or so and at best Bayard and Mante have one (two if you count the son that died) brother between the two of them.
- Where exactly does Bayard fall in the line of succession? Without any other princes dying, he's sixth in line in the first book and fourth in line in the third.
- Linnard's age makes no sense. In Sea Dragon Heir Tatrini explicitly states that Gastern is not yet married. By The Way of Light, four years later, he is married with a child, only Linnard is written as being of an age with his eleven-year-old uncle.
- The number of the emperor's sons never seems to change, even though in the beginning of Sea Dragon Heir when they were first mentioned, the youngest ones wouldn't even have been born yet.
The narrator of Frederik Pohl's Day Million is aware that his listeners are from around "the six or seven hundred thousandth day since Christ." He then identifies Day Million as "ten thousand years from now." Even assuming that his earliest estimate is correct (which would be well before the story's 1966 publication), that makes only forty days to a year. Granted, it could be just the impatient Lemony Narrator's carelessness, but you would think at least that fellow author and praising commentator Robert Silverberg would have something to say about it.
Pepper Winters' novel Debt Inheritance features Fetishized Abuser and evil aristocrat Jethro Hawk bragging to Damsel in Distress Nila that she'll never be able to run away across his "thousand hectares" of land. He later internally monologues about how he was once challenged to find his way across the land and in three days he couldn't reach the boundary. This would be impressive if a thousand hectares wasn't roughly four square miles, which a normal person could walk across in under an hour. Perhaps he was walking in a spiral.
If you pay attention to the dates of June in the fourth Diary of a Wimpy Kid book and February in the seventh book, you'll notice that they each last around six weeks. Ummm...
Deliberately invoked in the Doctor Who New Adventures novel Conundrum, which is set in a fictional pocket dimension. The Doctor is playing Scrabble and his opponent makes an excellent move which, as the Doctor points out, cannot be made on a standard Scrabble board. And then glares at the 'writer' for making a mistake.
Most of the dates in the journal entries of Bram Stoker's Scrapbook Story Dracula make no sense when compared with characters' descriptions of events in the text.
Averted in Greg Egan's works, which shouldn't come as any surprise given that he holds a BSc in mathematics. Stripped of plot and characters, Diaspora would make a fairly good introduction to topological groups.
The Dresden Files: Molly Carpenter is said to be 17 years old during the events of Proven Guilty, which takes place in July. In White Night, which is set the following May, she's 19. Somehow she had two birthdays in ten months.
Mercedes Lackey's The Eagle and the Nightingales. Early on, when Nightingale is hired for a job and informed that payscale varies depending on popularity, she's told that the highest payrate anyone's ever earned is a half-royal, equivalent to five gold pieces, and that this is jaw-droppingly impressive. Later, at the same job, she's given a payraise to five royals.
The Empirium Trilogy: Remy's age and the subsequent age gap between him and his older sister Eliana changes a couple times throughout the series. The first flashback into Eliana's past we get in Furyborn says she made her first kill when she was twelve and Remy was five, meaning there should be a seven year age gap. However, another flashback in the same novel explains she was ten when her father disappeared and the text states Remy was an infant when that happened, in other words less than a year old, making their age gap about ten years.
In Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes's Encounter With Tiber, it's stated that the hexadecimal system counts from 1 through E. Hexadecimal uses the digits 0 through 9 and the letters A through F. One assumes the error was Barnes'; with the computer systems of the 1960s, it's very likely that astronauts would've had to learn hexadecimal. The writers also failed to notice that 4097^note17*241 is not a prime number.
In Ender's Game, Bonzo Madrid commands Salamander Army for the entire time Ender spends at Battle School, which lasts about three and a half years. This requires either that Bonzo made commander impossibly early (younger than Ender himself does), or that he is long overdue for graduation when he fights Ender in the shower (which Graff explicitly denies is the case just a few pages earlier).
Eric, or Little by Little: Eric is twelve at the beginning of the novel. Part I takes place over his first year at Roslyn School and is followed by a Time Skip of another year. He should be fourteen at the beginning of Part II, but instead he's stated to be sixteen.
In The Fault in Our Stars, Hazel incorrectly believes that the infinite set between zero and two is larger than the infinite set between zero and one. However, Word of God states that it was intentional, as he didn’t want his characters to always be right. Also, John Green is so inept at mathematics that he has a ‘resident mathematician’, Daniel Biss, whom he calls — sometimes in the middle of filming — to clarify an equation.
Fifty Shades of Grey:
- There's simply no way that Ana can interview Grey on Monday, May 9, 2011 (the date given in E.L. James' short story Meet Fifty Shades), have five days pass, meet Grey in the hardware store in which she works on Saturday (which would be May 14), have "several weeks pass"—so three weeks at the very least—have a week of finals and then graduate on May 27. Any way you look at it, you can't squeeze five weeks between May 9 and May 27 without a time machine.
- The date of the interview changes in Grey, which is Fifty Shades of Grey from Christian Grey's point of view. The book's chapters are dated and Chapter One, the interview chapter, is titled "May 11, 2011." Why the date was changed is unclear, as it gives events even less time to occur and makes the still-canonical five-day gap between the interview and Grey's visit to Ana's place of employment on Saturday, May 14, 2011 impossible.
- In Fifty Shades Freed, Grey refuses to marry Ana any later than one month after his birthday (his birthday being on June 18, so the deadline for the marriage would be July 18). Since he nearly always gets his way (and has terrible temper tantrums when he doesn't), it seems likely that they married on July 18, if not before. Yet Ana can't remember how long she's been married. She mentions multiple times on the same day that she has been married for two weeks, three weeks, and a month. Even a week after this, when their honeymoon has ended and Grey and Ana are back in Seattle, Ana still insists that she has only been married for three weeks... as if time itself had stood still.
Although a scientist, Isaac Asimov clearly didn't do the math when it came to Trantor, the planet covered by one city in the Foundation Series (and the inspiration for Coruscant in Star Wars).
- Trantor's population at its height is given as over 40 billion in a single city covering all 75 million square miles of the planet's land area: assuming 45 billion people, this works out to 600 people per square mile, or roughly equivalent to the United Kingdom instead of a city like Manhattan (which has more than 65,000 people per square mile). However, the city is also explained to go a mile down: the available area increases significantly. If there are only 100 levels underground, actual population density drops to 6 per square mile. The problem with Trantor isn't overcrowding, it's finding someone else to talk to. Maybe he used the long scale? Even with other planets being used to supply Trantor with food (and probably remove the garbage) there have to be some pretty sizable facilities for processing, transporting, and disposing of everything. Most major cities try to locate as many of the power plants and water treatment centers outside city limits, but they still take up room somewhere. Even if every inch of the planet is covered in buildings, its impossible for anywhere near 100% of them to be residential structures. The prequel books indicates that relatively large areas of the planet are taken up other things than residential structures — power plants, yeast-food production, infrastructure, etc. The Psychohistorians itself gives three examples of relatively large, sprawling non-residential complexes: the University, the Palace and the spaceports (those giant food-transports have to land somewhere, after all!). Still, there doesn't seem to be enough to bring Trantor up to city-level population density.
- In David Brin's contribution to the Second Foundation Trilogy, Seldon reflects on Trantor's appearance as a global city is largely for show as befitting the capital of the Galactic Empire. A lot of it is uninhabited and a good chunk is actually devoted to storing the records of the activities of twenty five million worlds over the past twelve thousand years.
The Giver has ridiculously strict population control methods doomed to fail. Even with a completely cooperative populace, it will still fail because of math.
- Each family unit is allowed a maximum of 2 children, the same number of children are born each year and they are all assigned to a family unit. Not all adults have children, and not all family units have the maximum of 2 children.
- Birth mothers, the only job that allows giving birth, are only allowed to have 3 children each before they become laborers. This would require that at least 2/3 of all women become birth mothers to maintain a stable population, but this doesn't happen at the beginning of the book as the administration is handing out jobs to graduates.
Ian Fleming apparently did not take into account the weight of a bar of a gold, as Goldfinger's plan in his namesake book involves robbing Fort Knox blind (after using an atomic bomb to break open the vault) in just a few minutes. The Film of the Book noticed this problem, and changed his plan to irradiating the gold with the bomb, taking it off the market and rendering his own stash instantly more valuable. (A moment's thought will reveal this solves the original problem, but ends up Artistic License – Economics instead.)
Good Omens:
- A case of Editors Cannot Do Math: a line in one edition reads "Sable signed for it, his real name—one word, seven letters. Sounds like examine." Sable's real name is Famine, which generally has six letters, not seven. The line reads "one word, six letters" in the original MS, and in all other editions, but somehow ended up as seven in the Corgi edition.
- Newt is introduced as a twelve-year-old when Adam is an infant, then by the time Adam turns eleven, Newt has somehow managed to become 26.
- Anathema is likewise introduced as an eight-year-old in the "Eleven years ago" section, then claims in the present to have done a Ph.D. At 19, this seems rather unlikely. It's possible that she says this merely to mess with or intimidate Newt, but nothing in the text indicates that, and it seems out of character for her. It is also contradicted by the TV series promotional materials, which restate that she has a doctorate. Perhaps Agnes' prophecies enabled her to skip several years of school?
In The Carpet People, the Munrongs first realize there's trouble brewing when the summons to the once-a-decade Dumii census/tax Count doesn't arrive, its routine disrupted by the reappearance of Fray. A few skirmishes and a few days' travel later, Snibril tells Brocando that it's three years after the second Count of the current Emperor's reign. Either the Munrongs' journey actually took three years to pass, or their chief (who's slow, but not that slow) didn't even notice the summon was tardy for way, waaaaaaay too long.
F. Scott Fitzgerald made several errors with the timeline for The Great Gatsby: basically whenever a character mentions a number of years, it adds up a different way. The mystique and uncertainty behind Gatsby's past only partly accounts for it.
The Harry Potter series has many examples. J. K. Rowling has long admitted she's not very good with maths. Fandom calls these little errors "oh dear, maths" moments (after a line Rowling gave when she was asked to explain one of them in a World Book Day interview).
- Hogwarts' student population is much smaller than the narrative suggests. If we assume the number of students in Harry's year is representative of the typical Hogwarts class size and that the Sorting Hat scene goes through the entire incoming class, there are roughly 40 students per year; multiplied by seven years, that's about 280 students in total. However, a scene in the third book implies there's around 800 students, as three-fourths of the school are supporting Gryffindor while there are 200 Slytherin students at a Quidditch match. However, we never see any of this larger number of students. We only see five boys in Gryffindor in Harry's year, which is more consistent with a smaller student body^note. The classes have around 20 students in them, which if the smaller number were true would mean the Houses are sharing classes — which is exactly what we see. Additionally, there's only one teacher per subject with fourteen subjects; if there were really 800 students, either only a third of the school day is spent in class, or the teachers are all using Time Turners to teach three classes at once.
- The structure of Wizarding Britain as a whole suggests there's far more witches and wizards living there than the author's claim of three thousand magic-users. That really isn't that many people; for reference, a town with 3,000 inhabitants wouldn't even be big enough to have its own police station. Wizarding Britain, on the other hand, has enough wizards for a massive government bureaucracy with a ton of departments, an extensive law enforcement body with special forces and intelligence sections, and an entire league full of professional Quidditch teams. And that's before you take into account the 800-odd Hogwarts students, implying that a quarter of the magical population is in school.
- The Quidditch World Cup in Goblet of Fire is said to be the 422nd edition of the tournament. Quidditch Through the Ages says there are four years between each World Cup — but also that the first one was in 1473, which is impossible if the one in Goblet of Fire took place in 1994. You'd have to assume that nowadays it's every four years, but in the past it was held very sporadically. Which makes sense, considering magic is involved (for instance, the entire 1877 tournament had to be redone because nobody could remember it). Pottermore lampshaded the whole thing in its article on the Quidditch World Cup, claiming that "[a]s with so much else about the wizarding world's most important sporting competition, many query the accuracy of this statement."
- How Ollivander makes any money selling wands for seven Galleons apiece is questionable, as per Rowling's exchange rate they cost around 35 British pounds but are supposed to last the owner a lifetime. Assuming Ollivander sells 200-odd wands every year, which is generous,^note he'd only make around 7000 pounds a year. If all he sells are wands, that's not nearly enough to stay in business. And this is before getting into the fact that he has captive demand — if "the wand chooses the wizard", he's got a brilliant opportunity to extort young witches and wizards because he's the only one with the product that will allow them to make the most of their magic.
- The relative ages of Bill and Charlie compared to the other Weasley siblings is a mess. Both had left Hogwarts by the time Harry and Ron start there, with Rowling claiming Charlie's two years older than Percy, and Bill two years older than Charlie — except since Percy is in his fifth year in Philosopher's Stone, that means that Charlie should have been in his last year of Hogwarts or very recently graduated. This makes no sense when combined with the comment on Gryffindor's losing streak having lasted since Charlie last captained the team; assuming he played until graduation, that would have to be a couple of years at least. And it's more than that, because Prisoner of Azkaban says Gryffindor's last Cup win was seven years earlier, implying Charlie is at least seven years older than Percy and left the year before Percy started. (Rowling upped the gap between Percy and Charlie to three years, which solves the graduation problem but not the Quidditch problem.) No one disputes when Bill graduated, but it does create an odd line where Ginny mentions wanting to attend Hogwarts since Bill started, which would have been when she was a year old at the earliest.
- The ages of various adults just don't line up.
  - Snape and Lucius Malfoy are said to have been in the same social group at Hogwarts, but this is contradicted in various ways; supplemental material suggests Lucius is ten years older than Snape and thus couldn't have coincided at Hogwarts, while a flashback in Deathly Hallows reveals Lucius was a prefect in Snape's first year and therefore at least five years older than him.
  - Snape is 32 years old in Chamber of Secrets, but he was a contemporary of Harry's parents at Hogwarts, implying that Harry's parents were quite young when they had him. This is confirmed by James and Lily's headstone which put their birth in 1960 and their death on the 31st of October 1981. They canonically had Harry at 20 and died at 21, it doesn't seem to be a mistake on JKR's part.
  - Bellatrix Lestrange is also said to have been in Snape's social group at Hogwarts, but her younger sister Andromeda's daughter Tonks is in her twenties throughout the series, implying that Andromeda had a Teen Pregnancy right after graduating from Hogwarts. Trying to fit this into the timeline implies Bellatrix was probably in her sixth or seventh year when Snape started, so unlikely to be in his social group either.
- Attempts to provide exact dates for the series — specifically, having Harry enter Hogwarts in 1991 — lead to a few minor booboos. For instance, in Philosopher's Stone, Nicholas Flamel is stated to be 665 years old — but since he's a Historical Domain Character, and we know for sure that he was born in 1330, that would put the book's setting as 1995, just a few years off. And Order of the Phoenix has the students arriving on September 1 and starting class the next day, as usual — but that year, September 1 was a Friday, implying class on a Saturday. See what happens when you aim for specificity like that?
- Slytherin Quidditch captain Marcus Flint is introduced in Philosopher's Stone as a sixth-year, but is still the captian two years later in Prisoner of Azkaban when he should have graduated the year before. When faced with this, Rowling replied, "Either I made a mistake or he was held back a year. I think I prefer Flint making the mistake." Later editions of Philosopher's Stone correct this by calling Flint a fifth-year instead of a sixth-year.
In Hell Divers by Nicholas Sansbury Smith, what's left of humanity after a nuclear war lives on two airships and sends the titular divers back to the surface to scavenge for what they need to keep the ships going. So far, so good—but there are only about five hundred people per airship, and only two left, which itself is dicey (that is an incredibly small gene pool, and everyone has to be marrying their own cousins at this point). The real math problem kicks in when it's explained that only 1/5 candidates survive training, and after that most divers only make it about fifteen jumps. An airship with only five hundred people simply could not afford to be so profligate with their population, or it would very shortly be an airship with no people.
In Helm, there are two notable inconsistencies with ages:
- Marilyn de Noram is first described, through Leland's eyes, as a young woman who "couldn't have been much older than Leland" (two years older, it is later revealed). Later, Dulan de Laal says that Dillan de Laal is "fifteen years older" than Marilyn. In the family tree at the beginning of the book, Leland is 17 and Dillan is 27.
- It is said that when Dulan was 25, Dillan was 2 and Dexter "a slight swelling in his mother's figure". Dillan is in fact listed as three years older than Dexter (27 and 24), but Dulan is listed as 52 — two years older than this would imply.
In the Henry Reed series of books, it may look this way. Aging naturally for the first four books, then rebooting back for the fifth written much later. In reality it was probably a case of Not Allowed to Grow Up. Who cares about sixteen-year-old protagonists when you can contradict your own rules and make him thirteen again?
Mercedes Lackey's Heralds of Valdemar series has some problematic timelines.
- The Tedrel Wars, for example. According to Exile's Honor (p. 68, in the Daw Books paperback) Jadus was "older than Alberich, approaching middle age" when Alberich arrived in Valdemar. Alberich must then have been at least 25, maybe even 30, seeing as he had been selected at the age of 13, his training in the Karsite military Academy had lasted "long years", and after his training he had spent seven years in active duty in the mounted troops (p. 12-14, 73, 99 in the Daw Books paperback) before he arrived in Valdemar. Therefore, Jadus would have been at least 40, possibly 50, when he fought in the Tedrel Wars some 5-10 years later. In the Arrows Trilogy, he dies of old age. Considering that Healers are readily available, that can't have been before he was 60, making the Tedrel wars 10-20 years ago. Potential problem? Elspeth was born fairly exactly 2 years after the Tedrel Wars, because Selenay married close to the end of her year of mourning after Sendar's death, and conceived very soon after having married. Elspeth is a small child (based on her general behavior in Arrows of the Queen, maybe 5 or at most 8) when Jadus dies. So "approaching middle age" in Valdemar would be similar to what we mean with "middle age" in our world with modern medicine, and Elspeth should be a teenager or young adult in Arrows of the Queen, unless Jadus did go to war at the ripe age of approximately 55.
- Another problem comes when you consider Skif. His mentor, Bazie — who fought in the war — says that "Wuz back yon twenny yearn, easy, mebbe thutty" (page 104 in the Daw paperback of Take a Thief). A few years later, Skif goes to the Collegium. At this point it's probably about 25 years after the wars, by what Bazie said. Problem? Skif gets to the Collegium before Talia arrives. When Talia arrives, Elspeth is a "small child". Again, she'd be a young adult by that point, and we know that Bazie could count, because he taught all his boys the three basic Rs. Considering Talia is 13 herself and Talia is supposed to bring discipline to Elspeth's life, Elspeth's age really does not add up at all.
A failure to account for the Square-Cube Law resulted in some ships in Honor Harrington of the stated mass and dimensions being about as dense as smoke. The stated dimensions were cut by about 2/3rds in later editions to correct for this.
- In Echoes of Honor, a velocity is given as "about four thousand KPH [kilometers per hour] — make it sixty-seven KPS[kilometers per second]" — oops!^*
- One source puts missile acceleration figures as x-thousand KPS2. It's g's, not KPS2, and the conversion factor is not even close to 1. A really bad mistake, as the missiles would come close to the speed of light with those acceleration figures, and the whole MDM technology would be utterly redundant.
- In the same book, a more subtle error is in the missiles which "accelerated at four thousand gravities." That means they fly a distance of 20km in the first second. They are locked-on manually, and there are six of them in the air at the same time. Assuming launch intervals of only two to three seconds ("Target Two up!" — "Launch Two!" — "Two away!" is spoken), that's at least ten seconds between the first missile and the sixth. And a distance of 2000km assuming constant acceleration. Even more importantly, an impact velocity of 400km/s, which would make them effective kinetic weapons — although Weber writes that they are not. (Certainly not at peak efficiency, but equally certainly effective.)
- In Mission of Honor, 9000 treecats (and quite a lot of humans) are killed, which is represented as "close to 1% of twelve million." It is stated twice, and it's a plot point. 90,000 would be reasonably accurate (though rounding up quite a bit), but 9000 is less than 0.1%.
Horatio Hornblower: In Hornblower in the West Indies, Hornblower is stated to run into a colleague he last saw during the defense of Riga in 1812, "twenty years ago",^noteChronicled in Commodore Hornblower which would be fine if Hornblower was made Commander of the West Indies in 1832... except it is explicitly set in 1821-23 — crucially, the first chapter, "St. Elizabeth of Hungary", involves Napoleon Bonaparte's death in 1821 — just a decade after Napoleon's invasion of Russia.
Hover Car Racer has two examples. The more obvious one is Syracuse claiming that 10 out of 2000 equals 0.005% (it's actually 0.5%, or a proportion of 0.005); the less obvious one is in one of the early leaderboards - Jason has more points than should be possible for someone at such a low ranking and at that point in the year.
In The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Katniss describes the Cornucopia as being 40 yards away from the launch platform, which is located in a circular lagoon. There are twelve spokes of land separating the 24 tributes, and Katniss is equidistant from the land strip and the adjacent tribute platform. If you do all the calculations, it turns out that Katniss is about seven yards from the nearest land strip. Katniss has to swim this distance, and describes it as "a longer distance than [she's] used to swimming" back in the lake outside District 12.
In the Inheritance Cycle, if you bear in mind that Eragon is sixteen when Murtagh tells his back story, then you'll notice that a year disappears in the midst of the same exposition it was mentioned in. Of course, you also have to know that the two share a mother, meaning that if it was three years after Murtagh's birth that their mother ran away to hide her pregnancy from Morzan, then Eragon couldn't possibly be only two years younger, since Murtagh mentions that his most recent birthday was when he turned eighteen. In fact, you may be losing two years in there, but it could be due to Retcon.
The Stars And Stripes Trilogy by Harry Harrison at one point features an Irish soldier who has just finished twenty years hard labor in Australia, for his part in a rebellion five years ago.
Stephen King
- According to the last couple of volumes of The Dark Tower, in which King uses himself as a character, Stephen King was 22 in 1977, despite having been born in 1947. Possibly justifiable in that parallel worlds are of extreme significance in the story, and it's quite possible that the Stephen King of "Keystone Earth" was born in 1955.
- In Pet Sematary, Louis Creed is stated to be 35 years old. Later, however, he reminisces about last flying a kite at age 12, "nineteen years ago," which would make him 31. Rachel, meanwhile, is said to have been eight in 1965, 18 years before the beginning of the novel, by which time she and Louis have been married for ten years. That'd mean she got married at 16. Seeing how her father was opposed to the wedding, it seems improbable that she got married before turning 18.
in Lady of the Lake when Logde of Montecalvo votes whether or not let Ciri see Geralt, before Filippa gets to vote one of the sorceresses says it's a draw. Actually counting the votes show that it's not, there were 5 votes for and 4 against.
The Laundry Files is a complete aversion. Computational theory and related fields are the key component of magic in the setting, and the main character is one of the most talented computational demonologists of his generation (in a job where getting the math wrong can be fatal - or worse). Expect a crash course on Riemannian, Lorentzian and Calabi-Yau manifolds, the difference between P- and NP-complete problems and the mathematical foundations of the Everett-Wheeler cosmology and its relation to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Also, the author insinuates that the reason volume four of The Art of Computer Programming took nearly 30 years to complete is that someone read and edited out all the bits that might bring the Elder Gods back from beyond the stars, but that some of it is still left in chapter 7.9. The math scans beautifully for those who understand it, and for those to whom the math reads as "blurble blurble jargon blurble" the novels are still completely comprehensible.
In The Legend of Rah and the Muggles, Stubby aged from five to fifteen over the course of twenty-two years.
Little Women apparently starts on Christmas Eve of 1860, because a year later, when Amy makes her will, she writes the year "1861" on it. Yet the Civil War is portrayed as well underway from the start, when it began in 1861. Then, at one point toward the end of the book, Jo reflects that tomorrow is her 25th birthday, but a close look at the timeline reveals that she should only be turning 23.
The Lockwood & Co. books have some issues with the timeline of the Fittes family. In the second book, the main characters attend a party celebrating the 50th anniversary of Marissa Fittes' first successful ghost hunt. Given what we know about ghost-hunting powers, she can't have been older than her late teens, meaning (if she wasn't dead) she should now be in her 60s. But the first book has her adult granddaughter Penelope mention a friend who was about her age, who died thirty years ago at age ten - that is, when Marissa was in her thirties. It's possible for someone who's under 40 to have a ten-year-old grandchild, but it involves teen pregnancies or even preteen pregnancies, and no one ever mentions those when discussing the family.
"Lord of the Wolves" by Alexandre Dumas is a horror story about a man who is granted unholy powers. However, the first time he uses them, one hair on his head turns fire red. The second time, it happens to two hairs, the third time, to four hairs, and so on. At one point in the novel, it is stated that more than half of his hairs are red. He proceeds to use his powers a few times more, and by the end of the book, only one single hair on his head remains normal. The problem is, if you add 1 + 2 + 4 + 8... together, the number of red hairs almost exactly doubles with every use of the power. So if it is stated that more than a half of his hairs have been turned "evil", he gets one more use of the power at most, and no hairs on his head would remain unchanged. This is especially jarring as it would not impact the plot in any way if the amount of hairs changed into red mid-novel was realistic — not all uses of the character's powers are listed explicitly, all that matters for the purpose of the plot is the single remaining hair by the end.
Stephen Erikson has some issues with timelines in Malazan Book of the Fallen. While, at first glance, everything seems to function fairly well, many dedicated fans of the series trying to put together a timeline of events quickly realized that for the books' narrative to make sense, some events would have had to happen almost a decade after the time they were stated to take place, while others would have to happen before events that chronologically occurred later and, in one case, a particularly important event would have to occur before the events that lead to it. It's quite telling that the books after House of Chains don't include the date that they take place, because the timeline is a mess. In particular, Toll the Hounds features a child who is 5 years old and was conceived during the events of Memories of Ice, despite the fact that no more than 3 years have passed during the intervening books.
Mary Russell: In The Beekeeper's Apprentice, "Mr. Todd" is told he's a shilling short in payment and counts out "three pennies, a ha'penny, and six farthings". Three plus one half plus six quarters equals five, but there were 12 old pence in a shilling. Fixed in later editions, where it's ten pennies instead of three.
Lois McMaster Bujold's math is usually spot on, but Mirror Dance seems to have been shifted from two years after the previous book to four years after late in production. This caused attendant chronological confusion throughout the novel.
In Le Morte D Arthur, Lancelot faces a dozen armored knights while unarmored himself. He kills one of them, takes his armor, then kills "the remaining twelve." Malory takes the trouble to name each one individually, so you'd think he'd have remembered to decrement the count.
The Name of the Wind is usually very good with mathematical consistency, but apparently Rothfuss dropped the ball when he was writing the scene where Kvothe takes his University entrance exam. The mathematics master asks for the length of the third side of a triangle with a sixty-degree angle between sides of 3 feet and 7 feet. Kvothe's answer, "Six feet six inches, dead even", is accepted as correct... except that the answer is actually the square root of 37, which is slightly less than six foot one inch. Even given that he's doing it in his head, he really should have known the answer was closer to 6 feet than 6.5 feet. Since the square root of 37 is irrational, there's no possible way for "six feet six inches" to be exactly correct, unless they use some strange sort of inch that's an irrational multiple of a foot. This was corrected in later editions.
An Older Than Print example: In the Nibelungenlied, Siegfried and Kriemhild have a son who is born in the tenth year of their marriage. Shortly after that Siegfried is murdered by Hagen. Kriemhild then spends three and a half years mourning for him before accepting Etzel's proposal. Twelve years into her second marriage she invites her brothers for her party of revenge. So the second half of the epic takes part more than 25 years after the first part (from Siegfried's arrival at Worms to his and Kriemhild's wedding), but characters don't age accordingly. Giselher, the youngest of the brothers is still referred to as "the child", while Siegfried's son disappears from the narrative without explanation after Siegfried's death even though he should be about sixteen, grown up by medieval standards, by the end. Hagen's feat of single-handedly sinking Siegfried's gigantic hoard (more than 1000 wagonloads) in the Rhine is, shall we say, highly improbable, as was his later feat of ferrying the Burgundian train (10,000 men) across the Danube in one day with just one boat.
In the Night Huntress series by Jeaniene Frost, Annette says she was 14 when she was forced into an arranged marriage, and met Bones "several years" after. If we conservatively call "several" three, she was 17. She conceived a child after that, as she states that the father could have been either her husband or Bones. So we have her giving birth at probably 18 or older. She describes being ill for months following the breech delivery, during which time Bones helped her recover. Then she relates his being sent to Australia and returning 19 years later to make her a vampire. So she was at least 37. But the same book states her age as being 36 when she was turned. This works only if we take "several" to mean "two". Which it really doesn't.
In Orphan Black The Next Chapter, Art describes taking down the threats to the clones "over a decade ago." The series is marketed as taking place 8 years after the first series (and given the ages of the Boston clones and their year of birth, this places the audiobook as taking place in 2021.) Speaking of ages, the Ledas are said to be 6 years older than the Boston clones who were born in 1993. The Ledas were born 1984, 9 years before them.
The epilogue of The Orville novella Sympathy for the Devil features a scene of an elderly Ty Finn visiting a bakery and states that he is about 75 years old. However, it also describes the bakery he visits as featuring "early 26th-century technology," which would set the scene in at least 2500. The show's previously established timeline sets the events of the third season in 2424 and Ty is already pre-teen at the start of the series. This means that in this scene, he would have to be closer to 90, unless there is some sort of temporal weirdness going on that hasn't yet been revealed.
Faye Kellerman's Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus series has been playing a bit loose with Decker's age in order to keep him out of retirement. In the first book, which was published in 1986 and presumably takes place no later than that year, Decker was described as 38-years-old and a Vietnam vet. Rina's two sons are seven and eight. By the 2010 book Hangman, the sons are still in college and Decker is just turning 60. You do the math. ^note
In The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkeley, a character enumerates twelve conditions the criminal must fulfill, and states: "The mathematical odds against their all being fulfilled in one person are... 479,001,600 to 1. And that, mark you, is if all the chances are even ones." Two errors here. Firstly, 479,001,600 is 12 factorial, but he should be calculating two to the twelfth power — 4,096. Secondly, those are the odds against any particular person fulfilling all the conditions, which is completely irrelevant — after all, assuming he's correct in saying that the crime must have been committed by someone fulfilling all twelve conditions, the probability that someone fulfills all the conditions is 100%! The question should be, "What are the chances that, given that a particular person fulfills all the conditions, that person is the criminal?" — and the answers to the two questions will not, in general, be the same. This particular fallacy is common with real-world prosecutors too. "The chance that the defendant's DNA would match that found on the crime scene by pure chance is less than one to a million" sounds much more convincing than "The defendant is one of ten or twenty people in the New York metro area whose DNA match".
A plot point in The Power Of Un, where the Time Travel MacGuffin has to accept its figures as the number of minutes to be rewound — so, of course, the hero gets his math wrong and accidentally goes back to the beginning of the previous day. However, the author gets his math wrong twice; first of all, the time he ends up at is not consistent with his answer, and, when Rainy is asked to provide the correct answer (much to her bemusement, since to her, it's just a random, spur-of-the-moment multiplication problem), she gets a result which is still incorrect.
In Rainbow Six, we are told a group of terrorist is composed of 15 people. However, there's three trucks with three terrorists in each (9), five in the hospital (14), the boss (15), and his second (16). Furthermore, we are told only six of the fifteen (well, sixteen) survived, which is not true: four of the hospital group surrendered, the boss was captured alive, as was one of the truck drivers. Furthermore, an entire truck was flashbanged, and all three of its occupants were captured, which would make for nine prisoners, not six.
A calendar hiccup in Remote Man by Elizabeth Honey, features Thanksgiving approximately three-fifths of the way through the book, but sets the climax on November 30th, by which point several weeks have gone by.
In Roots, Kizzy's date of birth is explicitly stated to be September 12, 1790. She is around 16 when her son Chicken George is born, placing his birth around 1806. However, less than a year after Emancipation, which took place in 1865, Chicken George is stated to be sixty-seven when he should only be fifty-nine.
A Series of Unfortunate Events has quite a few ages and timelines that don't seem to fit together. Then again, the Back Story is laden with unreliable information and all sorts of things which make very little sense.
The Sixty-Eight Rooms:
- In this book, the kids shrink to the same scale as the Thorne rooms — one inch to one foot. When Ruthie comes across a crack on the ledge that measures a half an inch, the story states she finds it too large to walk over on her own. This crack would actually be scaled to six inches to the shrunken Ruthie, an easy obstacle to walk past.
- A minor issue — the museum was stated to close at 5 pm. Jack and Ruthie slipped into the corridor at 4:55 and got up when Jack looked at his watch to read 6:00. They did not sit for over an hour.
In Skulduggery Pleasant, Valkyrie ages by one year each book for the first few books. In books 1 to 5 she ages from 12 to 16, (the third book specifying she's has just reached 14) but each book lasts a period of less than a month, and the gap between each book is often less than a year. Some specific examples were mentioned; the gap between books 2 and 3 is 6 months, 3 to 4 is 11 months, and 4 to 5 is 5 months, meaning Valkyrie aged from approximately "13 and a half" to 16 in a period of 22 months.
A Song of Ice and Fire:
- George R. R. Martin often creates a one-year confusion by using the "in his Xth year" formulation.^note For instance, Jaime Lannister is claimed to have been elected to the Kingsguard in his 15th year. However, whenever his age is referred to, the book clearly says 15.
- Martin also intentionally avoids being specific about distances because he knows he would get the math wrong and readers would complain. He still seems to fail a bit on Unit Confusion as he talks about large, heavily burdened groups (armies, the royal convoy, etc) covering "thousands of leagues" (1 league = 3 miles) in a matter of days; at a slow walk on horseback thousands of leagues should take months.
- As this blog points out the number of tens of thousands he gives for the armies are often implausible with the medieval logistics available. Dropping a zero from the total gives much more believable sums for the cultural level.
- In-Universe, Samwell Tarly points out that the books in Castle Black are all suspect about their historical accuracy, as the kings in them rule for hundreds of years and they talk of knights centuries before the Andals came to Westeros.
At the beginning of Soon I Will Be Invincible, Doctor Impossible says that there are 1,686 persons with superpowers on Earth and then gives a breakdown by type which sums to 1,778. It's possible there's intended to be some overlap, however.
Star Wars Legends:
- The Coruscant Nights trilogy has a lot of this. The author intended for it to take place shortly before the original trilogy, but the people in charge decided at the last minute to change it to shortly after the prequel trilogy without bothering with much editing, making many references to past events almost twenty years off.
- There's a big plot hole in The Thrawn Trilogy where Darth Vader was involved in a plot-critical event 44 years before the present day of the story. Luke and Leia, at this stage, cannot be any older than 28, meaning Anakin Skywalker would have had to have been Darth Vader sixteen years before his children were born. While this preceded the release of the prequel trilogy which obsoleted a lot of what Timothy Zahn had based his writing on (particularly the nature of the Clone Wars and the fall of the Old Republic), he apparently just didn't consider the ramifications of the plot point on the family timeline (never mind that this meant Vader would presumably have had to have been a Dark Jedi for at least 16 years before being crippled and turned into a cyborg). This was handwaved away by stating the Noghri have a much shorter measurement of years compared to Galactic standards, with forty-four roughly corresponding the equivalent of twenty-nine GSY.
In an early draft of Oksana Pankeeva's Strange Kingdom Chronicles prince Elmar, king's cousin and a close friend, buys a hairpin for his fiancée for 200K, and it is mentioned that while this is an extremely expensive hairpin, he is rich enough to afford blowing that much money on a trinket that his beloved just happened to like (for the record, his fiancée, Azil, has no idea that this hairpin is expensive). Much later king Shellar mentions in a conversation that his treasurer stole some money, and, while Shellar certainly would get this money back eventually, he has some ideas that he'd like to implement right now, but each one would cost more than a million. That early draft was uploaded to Pankeeva's website, and one reader pointed out that the king might just take a loan from his cousin. The numbers were then adjusted, so that the published version lists the hairpin price as 50K and king's ideas now cost more than ten millions each.
Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale is an otherwise superb, captivating story. Until, that is, two highly intelligent characters (Setterfield says explicitly that these two are brilliant and gives numerous legit examples) notice a geometric shape in a topiary and argue about whether it is a tetrahedron or a dodecahedron. Setting aside the fact that these are obviously different shapes (tetra = 4, dodeca = 12), the author then mentions that the topiary in question has six sides and the characters agree it's a tetrahedron! (A tetrahedron has four faces, four vertices, and six edges. A dodecahedron has twelve faces, twenty vertices, and thirty edges.)
The Chance Matthews novel Threshold by Caitlín R. Kiernan contains a rare attempt of an author to include mathematics higher than arithmetic, but unfortunately falls headlong into this trope. The book lists a regular heptagon (a seven-sided polygon with all sides and angles the same) as an Alien Geometry based on the fact that a regular heptagon is not constructible. However, in geometry, "not constructible" means "cannot be drawn with only a straightedge and compass." It does not mean "cannot be made with any tool known to man" (you can draw a regular heptagon just fine if you have an accurate protractor and ruler) and most definitely doesn't mean "cannot exist in nature" or "seeing one will cause you to Go Mad from the Revelation."
Timeline difficulties are very common in Tortall. Some fans have spent a lot of effort trying to make sense of it all. This is because Tamora Pierce actually has dyscalculia, which is like dyslexia with numbers.
This is common in the later works by Harry Turtledove, as noted here.
The Twilight Saga:
- The original Twilight has a bad case of this. The most prominent example is the author appearing to have no idea how long driving from one place to another would take. There is an attempt to justify it by establishing that Edward Drives Like Crazy, but even then there are moments that are suspect. The most egregious example would be the claim that Edward and his brothers drove from Forks, Washington to Alaska in 16 hours, which would not only require them to be driving at ludicrous speeds without stopping for gas or anything, is not even possible. The trip from Forks, Washington to Denali Borough in Alaska, is a road distance of over 2,300 miles, meaning he drove at an average of 144 miles per hour, also known as 230 kilometers per hour.
- In Breaking Dawn, Carlisle states that Renesmee's growth seems to be slowing down after she is born. This is a child that spend a month in the womb, thus gestating at nine to ten times the rate of a human baby; then, three to four months after she is born, she apparently looks about five. That means that after she was born, she grew at fifteen to twenty times the rate of a human child.
The three Jules Verne novels 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (set in 1866-1867), Captain Grant's Children (also called In Search of the Castaways) (1862-1864) and The Mysterious Island (1865-1869) take place in the same 'verse, the latter being a sort of sequel to the former two. However, in the latter book, Verne states that the story takes place 20 years after 20,000 Leagues, and 12 years after Captain Grant's Children. He even makes up entirely new dates for his previous novels.
In Warrior Cats, Firestar's nine lives is quite the Continuity Snarl for various reasons, but when you count how many he lost in the books, it altogether adds up to him having only lost seven lives when he dies for good (or eight if you include the fox trap one in Sunset that the authors/books have flip-flopped on): Scourge in The Darkest Hour, rats in Firestar's Quest, a falling tree in Dawn, potentially the fox trap in Sunset, greencough in Long Shadows, a fox mentioned at the start of The Fourth Apprentice, Russetfur in Fading Echoes, wounds from Tigerstar in The Last Hope.
The Way Series: In Eon, the protagonists find a source of an "inverse-square force". A couple of pages later, the force is described as increasing in strength as one gets farther from it.
In Louis Sachar's Wayside School series, Wayside School has thirty classrooms, but the total number of students is given as 4500. That would be an average of 150 students per classroom, and since we know that the 30th classroom has 29 students... Then again, the nineteenth classroom/floor both does and does not exist depending on the story (along with its students and teacher), so this might just be Rule of Funny.
There's a glaring example in the Weather Wardens book series by Rachel Caine. The lead character, Joanne, has a supernatural adult daughter named Imara, who technically doesn't age. In the fifth book, Firestorm, a character comments to Joanne that she is "plenty old enough" to have an adult daughter. Joanne's character is twenty-eight years old, there's no way she could have an adult daughter. Suppose Imara is twenty years old; that would mean Jo had her at eight years old. Granted, girls as young as five giving birth have been documented, but the clear implication of the above statement is that Jo is old enough to have had a child at a typical age long enough ago that that child would be an adult.
Wereling (2009): In the third book, Ella introduces Trey to the rest of the LG78 werewolf pack; the narration mentions half a dozen members, and from the context, might not be counting Ella. By the end of the book, there are five members total, which includes Ella.
Rory from Wicked Good was born on October 28, 1991, during the Perfect Storm. Since he's fifteen now and starting tenth grade, it should be fall of 2007, which doesn't stop Archer from wondering if her mother Rose's ability to live comfortably off interest has changed after 2008.
WIEDERGEBURT: Legend of the Reincarnated Warrior volume 8 states that only two thousand people survived the Sekbeist attack on Vesperia, said to be less than "a thousandth of a percent" of the previous population of 550,000. Actually, that's 0.36 percent.
Rick Cook's fantasy novel The Wizardry Compiled contains this fantastic explanation of the concept of "fencepost error" by a supposedly guru-level programmer:^{The error}
Master: Yeah. Look, say you've got a hundred feet of fence to put up and you need to put a post every ten feet. How many posts do you need?
Pupil: Ten, of course.
Master: Nope. Eleven. Unless you string your fence in a circle. If you put the posts in a closed figure, you only need nine because you start and end on the same post.
Pupil: And how am I to know such things?
The people of Wool have population control laws such that only lottery winners can have a single child. Only lottery winners who naturally conceive twins can have two children. Somehow, the population keeps growing.
Tony Rothman holds a doctorate in physics ... but in his novel The World Is Round an AI expresses times in "light-meters", with an embarrassing error: the AI says something is not scheduled for some "ten to the fifteenth light-meters", which he then says is "a few years". It's actually only a little over a month.
In Wuthering Heights, the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw claims in Lockwood's vision of her that she's been lost on the moors for 20 years. But at that point in the timeline, it's only been 17 years since her death. Granted, she might just be a nightmare of Lockwood's, not the real Catherine's ghost. Also, it has been more than 20 years since she accepted Edgar Linton's marriage proposal, so she may see herself as having "lost her way" not when she died, but when she turned her back on her true love Heathcliff. A more blatant error is found a scene that takes place earlier in the same year as the ghost scene, when Heathcliff describes himself as having mourned Catherine's death for 18 years.
The X-Men novel Smoke and Mirrors by Eluki Bes Shahar says that America has 280 million people, of whom 2% are mutants, with a total mutant population said to be in the thousands. 2% of 280 million is 5.6 million.

Writers Cannot Do Math / Literature

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