Catherine Asaro
The Saga of the Skolian Empire series
From Wikipedia:
Quote:
The Saga of the Skolian Empire, informally called the Skolian Saga, is a series of science fiction novels, novelettes and novellas revolving around characters from an interstellar empire known as the Skolian Empire and their power struggle with the rival Eubian Concord. The plot of the book unfolds over several generations of characters and revolves around political intrigues, but also contains subplots regarding romance, physics, bio-enhancements, and virtual computer networks.
Asaro is known for including sophisticated mathematical concepts in her fiction. The method of space travel used in the Skolian Empire books comes from a paper Asaro wrote on complex variables and special relativity that appeared in the American Journal of Physics. The novel Spherical Harmonic involves an imagined universe based on the Hilbert space described by the spherical harmonic eigenfunctions that solve the Laplace Equation, and some prose in the book is written in the shape of the sinusoidal waves found in the spherical harmonics.[7] Her novel The Quantum Rose is an allegory to quantum scattering theory and is dedicated to her doctoral advisors and mentors in the subject, Alex Dalgarno, Kate Kirby, and Eric J. Heller. The novella "Aurora in Four Voices" includes topics ranging from Fourier series to integration problems in calculus, as discussed in Mathematical Fiction forum. In essays in the back of some of her novels, Asaro explains the mathematical and physics basis of the ideas used in the books, in particular Spherical Harmonic, The Quantum Rose, and The Moon's Shadow.
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From me:
This is a great scifi series, a mix of hard scifi and space opera. There are plots and subplots, various story arcs involving the characters, an interesting cultural clash between the enemies and all-around great world-building. She slips the science into you without you really realizing it. Her Saga of the Skolian Empire books are ones that I re-read in their entirety every couple years.
She wrote the books out of chronological sequence, so if you want to know both the publishing and chronological sequences, see this Wiki link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Asaro