Lewis Carroll in Numberland: His Fantastical Mathematical Logical Life: An Agony in Eight Fits

by Robin J. Wilson

Book Overview

Just when we thought we knew everything about Lewis Carroll, here comes this "insightful . . . scholarly . . . serious" (John Butcher, American Scientist) biography that will appeal to Alice fans... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393060276
• ISBN13: 9780393060270
• Release Date: November 2008
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.9" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Very Interesting Book

I liked this book because it is a bio of Lewis Carroll from a mathematical standpoint. Yes, it does touch on his literary career, but is mostly about his development as a mathematician and an Oxford Don.

A puzzling fellow

For most people familiar with Lewis Carroll, it is because he was the writer of that classic story, Alice in Wonderland. What's less known is that even before he made his name in literature, he was a mathematician of some prominence, and that this field would creep into his fictional writing. Actually, Lewis Carroll was a pseudonym for Charles Dodgson, an Oxford educated mathematician of the mid-1800s. He would also teach at Oxford and start to write his stories there, as well as mathematical works. Always eager to please children (including the inspirational Alice), he would become one of the first people to develop recreational mathematics, a field that focuses on some of the more wonderfully entertaining aspects of numbers (particularly the whole numbers). Robin Wilson's Lewis Carroll in Wonderland serves as a biography of Dodgson/Carroll, focusing on his work in math. The first half or so is more filled with biographical facts; it is in the second half that we get more of the math, most of which requires no higher learning in the field. We get some of the word play, puzzles, logic problems and riddles that were Carroll's forte. Many are interesting, but admittedly, some of the problems that seem presented as logic problems are anything but, coming off more as tricky riddles and leaving the reader feel a little cheated. If you have an interest in the life of Lewis Carroll, this would probably be a good book to read; on the other hand, if you enjoy recreational mathematics, this book is merely okay. I tend to think of this book more as a biography, so I'll rate it as a good, four-star read, well-written and with plenty of illustrations.

A different perspective on Lewis Carroll

Few people know that Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) was an accomplished mathematician and logician, who held a lecturership in Maths at Oxford. Throughout his many children's books (the two Alice in Wonderland books being the best known) one can see the hand of a person obsessed with logic, numbers and wordplay. This book provides some of Lewis Carroll's life history, but the latter half of the book focuses specifically on his life as a mathematician. He developed some famous mathematical puzzles (as given in the book), a much easier way of calculating the determinants of 3x3, 4x4 and 5x5 matrices (explained in the book), and quite an ingenious way of drawing inferences in propositional logic (a diagrammatic method he called the "Game of Logic" as shown in the book). If you are not that much into puzzles and logic you might get more benefit from buying a plain biography on Lewis Carroll. However, the maths and puzzles are not crucial to the enjoyment of the book, and you can skip any of them without losing much. Also, the answers to the puzzles are all in the back of the book, and it is fun going through it, even if you don't work them out. If you love the quirky writing style of Lewis Carroll's books and also like working out puzzles, you will love this book and get the most out of it.

Alice's Creator's Mathematics

It is certainly enough for his reputation that Lewis Carroll wrote the two Alice books, whose whimsy will be part of literature (and not just children's literature) for the ages. Carroll never regretted the fame the books gave him, but he might have regretted that the world did not take him more seriously in his day job, that of mathematician. There is, for those who want to look for it, mathematics in the Alice books, but it is distorted and jocular just as is everything else in the books. Alice fans will be happy to learn more about Carroll's mathematical pursuits, and in _Lewis Carroll in Numberland: His Fantastical Mathematical Logical Life_ (Norton) mathematician Robin Wilson has summarized for non-mathematicians the serious mathematical efforts (often leavened with irrepressible wit) of the Reverend Charles Dodgson - to differentiate him from his pen name. Some of the math is daunting; Wilson invites readers to skip portions of it, but any reader will come away with a better understanding of this curious man's interests and the happy way he was able to handle pure mathematics as well as pure fantasy. Wilson's book is generally chronological, based on Carroll's life which was a fairly dull and conventional Victorian existence, except for his child friends, most (but not all) of them little girls who loved his jokes and stories. Carroll all his life was adept at making puzzles; as a child he designed mazes both on paper and in the snow. Carroll may not have had passions for adults, but he had a passion for Euclid, which in his time was thought the ideal method for teaching reason and logic. He defended Euclid against modern geometry texts in 1879 in _Euclid and his Modern Rivals_; to lighten it, he wrote it as a play in four acts! Carroll's mathematics intruded into his humor and vice versa. He wrote a young friend, "Please give my kindest regards to your mother, & ½ of a kiss to Nellie, & 1/200 of a kiss to Emsie, & 1/2000000 of a kiss to yourself." When he wrote seriously about syllogisms, the premises tended to be absurd, which is all the funnier since it affects the logic not at all: A prudent man shuns hyaenas. No banker is imprudent. Conclusion: No banker fails to shun hyaenas. He drew Bertrand Russell's admiration for contributions to logic with his hypotheticals, including a funny dialogue between Achilles and the Tortoise that seems to indicate that there is an infinite regress that must occur before we can accept any idea, just like the infinite steps that Zeno's Achilles must make before he can outrace the Tortoise. (This dialogue was happily a starting point in theme and style for _Gödel, Escher, Bach_.) But plenty of Carroll's logical and mathematical musings were serious and practical; Wilson notes that his work on voting systems (voting has unexpected mathematical complexities) was well regarded in the succeeding decades. He also developed a fairer system of tournaments whereby athletes compete and are el