November 24, 2000

Relating Education to Life

To the Editor:

I would like to compliment Scott Heller and The Chronicle for your coverage of an academic issue that has great bearing on the future of the liberal arts. I see hope and potential for academe in Scott Heller's article about a mathematical historian whose recent book propels her discipline into the messy real world ("A Historian's Tale, and a Mother's, Too," October 20). The article points to an important -- and, I believe, critical -- development, not an aberration, in