[Baron Munchausen]

AgentZero said:
For some reason, this reminded me of an old sci-fi story I read years ago. Might have been Heinlein but no matter. It was about some religious order that had spent thousands of years trying to catalogue all the names of God according to some crazy mathematical formula. At the end of the story, they were successful, and the head of the order steps out onto a balcony and looks up into the night sky, only to see all the stars in the sky, one by one, going out.

If they enlisted the help of modern computers to print them out, you are thinking of The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nin...n_Names_of_God