Algebra in Wonderland

[pokerfan]

March 7, 2010
By MELANIE BAYLEY
Oxford, England

Since “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” was published, in 1865, scholars have noted how its characters are based on real people in the life of its author, Charles Dodgson, who wrote under the name Lewis Carroll. Alice is Alice Pleasance Liddell, the daughter of an Oxford dean; the Lory and Eaglet are Alice’s sisters Lorina and Edith; Dodgson himself, a stutterer, is the Dodo (“Do-Do-Dodgson”).

But Alice’s adventures with the Caterpillar, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat and so on have often been assumed to be based purely on wild imagination. Just fantastical tales for children — and, as such, ideal material for the fanciful movie director Tim Burton, whose “Alice in Wonderland” opened on Friday.

Yet Dodgson most likely had real models for the strange happenings in Wonderland, too. He was a tutor in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, and Alice’s search for a beautiful garden can be neatly interpreted as a mishmash of satire directed at the advances taking place in Dodgson’s field.

In the mid-19th century, mathematics was rapidly blossoming into what it is today: a finely honed language for describing the conceptual relations between things. Dodgson found the radical new math illogical and lacking in intellectual rigor. In “Alice,” he attacked some of the new ideas as nonsense — using a technique familiar from Euclid’s proofs, reductio ad absurdum, where the validity of an idea is tested by taking its premises to their logical extreme.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/opinion/07bayley.html?pagewanted=print

[Warpy]

1. I took a symbolic logic class back in the 60s

that focused heavily on Carroll's writings on the subject.

"Alice" was the least of the man's work.

[comtec]

2. sounds interesting...

please elaborate? :)

[Dr. Strange]

3. Carroll did some work with deductive logic.

Here are some examples:
http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~hile/math100/logice.htm
Except the solutions are explained using contemporary logic.

[lazarus]

5. that takes me back

I wish I had finished my symbolic logic course. I had to drop out that semester (divorce, etc.). I can't remember any of it, except that it was fun.

[Warpy]

4. Carroll came up with puzzles for logicians

and they were a great deal of fun to work out. We used Quine's notation, as it was a bit simpler.