--- title: "Alice in Wonderland is mostly math jokes — Storica" url: https://daily.dev/posts/alice-in-wonderland-is-mostly-math-jokes-storica-lyjlmtwwv source_url: https://storica.club/blog/alice-is-math-jokes type: article source: "Hacker News" published: 2026-05-18T16:10:57.846Z updated: 2026-05-18T16:11:22.006Z tags: ["math"] reading_time: 8 upvotes: 0 comments: 0 language: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Alice in Wonderland is mostly math jokes — Storica **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 8 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary 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. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech \(1984\)](https://daily.dev/posts/the-alice-and-bob-after-dinner-speech-1984--tdxehjtmz) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [How Lewis Carroll computed determinants](https://daily.dev/posts/how-lewis-carroll-computed-determinants-kvvomtfyv) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [The Dark Night of Mathematics](https://daily.dev/posts/the-dark-night-of-mathematics-ux4sotowq) · Hacker News · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#math](https://daily.dev/tags/math) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/alice-in-wonderland-is-mostly-math-jokes-storica-lyjlmtwwv)