Letters to the Editor – The New York Times
This content was originally published by on 19 May 2017 | 11:00 am.
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LARRY D. WOODS
NASHVILLE
The writer is a professor of criminal justice at Tennessee State University.
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Show and Tell
To the Editor:
Re “Your Writing Tools Aren’t Mine,” by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Critic’s Take, April 30): One promising development on the landscape of M.F.A. creative writing programs in recent decades has been the emergence of nonfiction concentrations at many schools. Students practice memoir, essay, biography, literary journalism and other fact-based forms in which show and tell may be the better rule, and “art” and life (“politics, history, theory, philosophy, ideology”) need not conflict. The result is new writing that is as diverse as students’ own experience, as wide-ranging in content as curiosity will allow. “Write what you know” expands to “write what you can find out” through research. Faculty across genres in M.F.A. programs these days seek to foster unique student expression, but nonfiction, with its profusion of forms, may be the genre in which many students can most naturally find and exercise their own voices in workshops less bound by tradition.
MEGAN MARSHALL
BELMONT, MASS.
The writer, who won the 2014 Pulitzer in biography and memoir, teaches nonfiction writing and archival research in the M.F.A. program at Emerson College.
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By the Numbers
To the Editor:
James Ryerson reviewed three new exciting books on the history and role of numbers in society (Ivory Tower, May 7), among them Keith Devlin’s “Finding Fibonacci.” Arguably, Fibonacci’s greatest contribution was helping to introduce Europeans to the Hindu-Arabic numerals. Going from Roman numerals to this system dramatically simplifies and extends arithmetic calculation. Fibonacci, as a boy, learned the new way to represent numbers and to calculate with them in North Africa, (present-day Algeria), where his father was serving as a trade representative.
KEN McALOON
SOUTH DENNIS, MASS.
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To the Editor:
James Ryerson’s discussion of the Amazonian Pirahã’s sense of number (Ivory Tower, May 7), in connection with his discussion of Caleb Everett’s “Numbers and the Making of Us,” is reminiscent of the cognitive psychologist and epistemologist Jean Piaget’s observation that children’s earliest mathematics is ultrametric — not quantified metrically, but rather derived from concepts of enclosure and topology. Mathematicians call this early mathematics p-adic mathematics, in which numbers do not quantify count or measure size in the usual sense, but instead label paths of a hierarchy tree. Some cognitive scientists consider p-adic mathematics the natural mathematics of cognition, evolutionarily developed to conceptualize large quantities of complex information.
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ROBERT PASTER
PROVINCETOWN, MASS.
The writer is author of “Digital Mind Math,” the story of p-adic cognition.
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