Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) was a mathematics lecturer at Oxford for 26 years, and Alice in Wonderland is filled with mathematical jokes aimed at his academic colleagues. The multiplication table scene is a base-numbering joke (working correctly in bases 18, 21, 24, etc.). The Mad Hatter's stopped time parodies non-Euclidean geometry and the new physics Dodgson opposed. The Cheshire Cat's disembodied smile satirizes abstract mathematics separating properties from objects. The Mock Turtle's lessening lessons describe a decreasing arithmetic sequence. Dodgson intended Alice as a logic puzzle, not surrealism or psychoanalysis, and was frustrated that readers missed the mathematical underpinnings entirely.
Table of contents
The multiplication that does not workThe Hatter murdered timeThe Cheshire Cat is a property without a carrierReeling and Writhing, and the four branches of arithmeticDodgson hated what came nextWhy the book is gentle on a language learnerThe longer shelf166 Impressions