It’s not about science as a whole, but Assassination Classroom features one of the most beautiful uses of actual, genuine, 100% correctly represented math in fiction I’ve ever seen.
Spoilers:
During one of the exams, Karma is competing against the Principal’s son for top score. One of the problems involves calculating the volume of the Wigner-Seitz cell in a body-centered cubic lattice. This is obviously quite hard for middle schoolers, but believable for an exam whose explicit purpose was to test them to their limits and let the very best rise to the top. The Principal’s son tries to brute force the problem by decomposing the shape into a series of pyramids—doable, but very tedious. Meanwhile Karma realizes that it’s as simple as noticing that all atoms are equivalent and must have the same volume, and therefore there’s a simple and beautiful symmetry argument for why the volume is exactly 1⁄2 of the cubic unit cell. Which doubles as a metaphor for how everyone has their talents and domain they excel in—a realization Karma reaches thanks to his character growth. Absolutely top notch writing stuff.
It’s not about science as a whole, but Assassination Classroom features one of the most beautiful uses of actual, genuine, 100% correctly represented math in fiction I’ve ever seen.
Spoilers:
During one of the exams, Karma is competing against the Principal’s son for top score. One of the problems involves calculating the volume of the Wigner-Seitz cell in a body-centered cubic lattice. This is obviously quite hard for middle schoolers, but believable for an exam whose explicit purpose was to test them to their limits and let the very best rise to the top. The Principal’s son tries to brute force the problem by decomposing the shape into a series of pyramids—doable, but very tedious. Meanwhile Karma realizes that it’s as simple as noticing that all atoms are equivalent and must have the same volume, and therefore there’s a simple and beautiful symmetry argument for why the volume is exactly 1⁄2 of the cubic unit cell. Which doubles as a metaphor for how everyone has their talents and domain they excel in—a realization Karma reaches thanks to his character growth. Absolutely top notch writing stuff.