Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Crazy history of "Alice in the Wonderland"

From S Peter Davis & David A Vindiola's "6 Books Everyone (Including Your English Teacher) Got Wrong" in Cracked (via someone at ClassicScienceFiction Yahoo group):

I would never had guessed it: Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" is really a satire of the new mathematics that began appearing in 19th century & confused someone grounded in Euclidean maths!

And I didn't know that Lewis Carroll is actually a pen name of one Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematics professor whose familiar world was being turned upside down by crazy new concepts like imaginary numbers: '"Alice" was the sensible Euclidean mathematician trying desperately to keep herself sane and tempered, while "Wonderland" was really Christ Church College at Oxford, where Dodgson worked, and its inhabitants were just as barking mad as he thought his colleagues really were.'

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