mathematics

Review: A DOUBTER’S ALMANAC by Ethan Canin
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Review: A DOUBTER’S ALMANAC by Ethan Canin

ByMatt Matros

A Doubter’s AlmanacEthan CaninRandom House, Feb 2016576 pp; $28 Mathematicians toil in obscurity, often for years, at work that will probably come to nothing. It doesn’t take a Fields Medalist to understand why a novelist, that most uncertain toiler of all, would be drawn to such a plight. Milo Andret, the genius at the center…

The Formal Imagination of Oulipo
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The Formal Imagination of Oulipo

ByLara Palmquist

Founded in 1960 by a collective of French mathematicians and writers, Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature), or Oulipo, was established to identify new forms of writing using numerical and alphabetical constraints. Early member Georges Perec, for example, structured his novel Life A User’s Manuel according to the Knight’s Tour algorithm, in which…