- Title: Subtitle
- I thought you might find this interesting, I love you
- Creators
- Rachel Sudbeck
- Contributors
- Susan Steinberg (Advisor)Melissa Febos (Committee Member)Kerry Howley (Committee Member)
- Resource Type
- Thesis
- Degree Awarded
- Master of Fine Arts (MFA), University of Iowa
- Degree in
- English
- Date degree season
- Spring 2021
- DOI
- 10.17077/etd.005923
- Publisher
- University of Iowa
- Number of pages
- v, 96 pages
- Copyright
- Copyright 2021 Rachel Sudbeck
- Language
- English
- Public Abstract (ETD)
This book is meant to serve as a challenge to certainty, but not in an unconstructive way. The world we live in can be viewed through a lot of lenses, on a visual and metaphorical level. Taking the supposed objectivity of mathematics down a peg serves as a means of widening our scope on other systems, like mental healthcare, that try to pretend that uncertainty has no place in science. Our understanding of the world, and our own brains, is ever-changing and evolving. The best we can do is to embrace an understanding that a globe will shift when you map it to paper, or that a person’s face looks different depending on the angle you look at it, or that brains are just wildly more complicated than we can understand right now. Our best hope of finding compassion within the worlds of math and science is by accepting that bias has always lived in these systems, and that an illusion of certainty is much more damaging than a genuine acceptance of our own fallibility.
Through lyrical prose and careful research, this book explores mathematics and its relationship to wrongness. Through discussion of times when math once considered certainty was proven wrong, along with a family history of mental illness, Rachel Sudbeck is exploring her own family’s relationship to wrongness, feeling wrong, being wrong, and accepting the things that are wrong with the people you love.
- Academic Unit
- English
- Record Identifier
- 9984096974502771
Thesis
I thought you might find this interesting, I love you
University of Iowa
Master of Fine Arts (MFA), University of Iowa
Spring 2021
DOI: 10.17077/etd.005923
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