"Almost certainly what he did was said, 'Here's this cute story that I've written for this real Alice. "He added a lot of new material and it's all of that new material where you find the mathematical allusions. ![]() "The very first version of Alice in Wonderland story - that he wrote for the real Alice - had none of the mathematics," Devlin says. Without Carroll's secret ingredient, Alice might never have achieved her fame. "Last year, in fact, a scholar in Oxford called Melanie Bayley wrote a complete dissertation analyzing Alice In Wonderland, and she identified a number of mathematical allusions in the story." "We knew that Carroll was actually a mathematician," Devlin says. The hidden math in Alice may come as a surprise to many, but mathematicians have always known Carroll was slipping some numbers into his fiction. "In fact, when the Hatter and the Hare try to squeeze the Dormouse into the teapot, they're trying to somehow get away from this complexity - throw away another of the parameters, if you like - so that life can resume as normal."ĭevlin says Carroll's message is that we "get rid of all of this complexity in the first place, and let's just go back to the familiar old geometry that we've had since Euclid for 2,000 years." "It was just like the characters rotating round and round the tea party, round and round the table." "What Hamilton said was if you take this time parameter out of these new numbers, then the numbers would just keep rotating around - they won't go anywhere," Devlin says. But in the 19th century, people were developing all kinds of bizarre new algebras, where x times y was not equal to y times x. ![]() "To him, algebra was all about numbers," Devlin says. ![]() And, as Weekend Edition Math Guy Keith Devlin tells NPR's Jacki Lyden, "That particular scene - and lots of other scenes in Alice in Wonderland - were a reflection on the increasing abstraction that was going on in mathematics in the 19th century."Ĭarroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson, was a very conservative, traditional mathematician, Devlin says, and he didn't like the changes some were bringing to the discipline of mathematics. That's the riddle the Mad Hatter asks Alice. Author Lewis Carroll was also a math teacher in Oxford, England, and mathematicians say the Alice books are full of algebraic lessons - such as why a raven is like a writing desk. The first numbers that come to mind when thinking about Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland might be how much money the movie is raking in at the box office.īut numbers also appear to be woven in among the talking rabbits and smoking caterpillars of the original stories.
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