Longtime readers of this journal may recall that a few years ago, I posted about a (thus far unpublished) short story I wrote for an anthology themed around Abraham Van Helsing, the vampire-hunter character from Bram Stoker's Dracula. Its main character/narrator was the mathematician Charles Babbage -- though not quite what you might expect; since the real Babbage died some twenty years before the events of Dracula, Our Hero was actually Vampire!Charles Babbage. Most of his backstory didn't make it into the short (as it should be), but oralelk helped me flesh out some really fun details. (Brief version: Vampire!Charles Babbage sired by Vampire!Ada Byron Lovelace (world's first computer programmer, bled to death by her physicians in 1852), sired by Vampire!Evariste Galois (founder of group theory, shot 1832 in a duel).) It touched on NP-completeness and the Halting Problem, and was quite a lot of fun to write.

In later chitchat, someone -- I forget who, possibly oralelk or wintersweet -- suggested I could follow up with more stories of Vampire!Charles Babbage and other famous historical mathematicians, e.g. Richard Montague or Alan Turing. As yet, this idea has lain fallow. But I've been brushing up on my crypto theory these last few weeks, and as I was walking home from the print shop just now, an idea started to gel: Turing => Bletchley Park => cryptography => modern cryptography => abstract algebra => Galois!

Not sure if anything will come of it; one happy accident of a connexion isn't enough to hang a plot on. But I'll keep it in mind, and we'll see if it goes anywhere.

If somebody wanted to get me one of these as an early birthday present, I wouldn't, you know, be upset or anything.