Lewis Carroll in Numberland: His Fantastical Mathematical Logical Life [Hardcover]

Robin Wilson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 17, 2008

A penetrating work that explores the amazing imagination and mathematical genius of the man who wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Just when we thought we knew everything about Lewis Carroll, here comes a highly original biography that will appeal to Alice fans everywhere. Fascinated by the inner life of Charles Lutwidge Dodson, Robin Wilson, a Carroll scholar and a noted mathematics professor, has produced this revelatory book—filled with more than one hundred striking and often playful illustrations—that examines the many inspirations and sources for Carroll's fantastical writings, mathematical and otherwise. As Wilson demonstrates, Carroll—who published serious, if occasionally eccentric, works in the fields of geometry, logic, and algebra—made significant contributions to subjects as varied as voting patterns and the design of tennis tournaments, in the process creating imaginative recreational puzzles based on mathematical ideas. In the tradition of Sylvia Nasar's A Beautiful Mind and Andrew Hodges's Alan Turing, this is an engaging look at the incredible genius of one of mathematics' and literature's most enigmatic minds. 100 illustrations

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

British mathematician Wilson (Four Colors Suffice) paints a charming picture of Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, in this slender biography. Skipping over the most chronicled aspects of Dodgson's life with only a sharp side note deriding rumors of his pedophilia as bad history and bad psychology, Wilson focuses on Dodgson's mathematical and educational accomplishments: pamphlets and books on Euclid, an efficient way of calculating determinants, astute analysis of election methods, and systems of mnemonics and ciphers. Wilson also includes puzzles (some with unsatisfying solutions); a number of Dodgson's photographs, for which Wilson labels him one of the most important photographers of the nineteenth century; and humorous and satirical letters suggesting political postulates such as, Let it be granted, that a speaker may digress from any one point to any other point. Though Dodgson was apparently not always a brilliant teacher or writer in his field, Wilson chooses some of his best work for the examples, and any fan of Victorian mind-benders or mid-level mathematics will enjoy the Dodo's witty and eager explanations of logical puzzles and games. 100 illus. (Nov.)
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From Booklist

For readers amused by the antics of the Mad Hatter and the riddles of the Cheshire Cat, the story of their creator’s life delivers paradoxes as delightful as those embedded in his immortal fiction. Wilson explores that life in a narrative laced with the fantasy and puzzles that lovers of Through the Looking Glass expect. But rigorous formulas figured prominently in the workaday life of a university professor of mathematics. Wilson’s narrative indeed details Charles Dodgson’s skillful use of his mathematical skills in defending euclidean geometry and in developing a new system of proportional representation for Parliament. However, many readers will find their primary interest in the way the academic mathematics of Charles Dodgson metamorphosed into the literary gems of his alter ego, Lewis Carroll. Readers will find rare magic, for instance, in Carroll’s conversion of Dodgson’s professional analysis of terrestrial rotation into a whimsical Wonderland exchange between Alice and the Duchess on the nature of time. A biography as full of twists as the capering of the Jabberwocky! --Bryce Christensen

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (November 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393060276
• ISBN-13: 978-0393060270
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #811,034 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A different perspective on Lewis Carroll, December 15, 2008

By 

Mr. A. Wentzel "Arnold Wentzel" (Cresta, South Africa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lewis Carroll in Numberland: His Fantastical Mathematical Logical Life (Hardcover)

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.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Alice's Creator's Mathematics, November 20, 2008

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lewis Carroll in Numberland: His Fantastical Mathematical Logical Life (Hardcover)

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 eliminated until one is the victor; this work was the best of its kind at the time, and no one for sixty more years looked at the problem in such depth.

There are many puzzles in this volume, and the merciful Wilson has provided answers. Carroll called many of them "Pillow Problems", as he solved them in his head, lying down; his capacity for calculation and reasoning without resort to diagrams or equations seems to have been prodigious. It has to be said that _Lewis Carroll in Numberland_ is not nearly so much fun as either of the Alice books (what could be?), but those of us who are devoted to Alice will get much pleasure in learning the often serious, often outlandish mathematical pursuits of her creator.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely,, January 17, 2009

By 

Robert C. Ross (New Jersey) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Lewis Carroll in Numberland: His Fantastical Mathematical Logical Life (Hardcover)

and go on till you come to the end: then stop."

Excellent advice, of course, but in the case of Charles Dodgson, the story is so enormous, one may never finish. Author of the two famous Alice books, creator of hundreds of early photographs, mathematician with papers on logic, algebra, geometry and the mathematics of voting, author of almost 100,000 letters, and diarist with ten massive collected volumes -- it's amazing that one person could produce such a volume of work.

The Alice books have gone through hundreds of editions over the years, there are collections of his puzzles and scholarly analyses of his works on the mathematics of voting (some of which would cast light on the complexities of Amazon's Ranking systems). Dodgson was even something of a wine expert with a delicious spoof on wine tasting based on experts in tasting jam (see the first Comment).

Robin Wilson has put together an excellent summary of Dodgson's life and some superb extracts from his writing for children. He alludes to his contributions to photography, albeit with very few examples; Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll by Douglas R. Nickel is an excellent source.

The heart of the book is an assessment of Dodgson's work as a mathematician. It's not really necessary to work out all of the problems -- although it is certainly possible to do so with Wilson's help and basic algebra and geometry training. The book moves swiftly, but be warned, some of the problems are so cleverly written, you may find yourself trapped and spend several pleasant minutes, even hours, working your way through to a solution.

Either way, you'll come away from this excellent study with a deeper appreciation of Dodgson's complex imagination and with a real appreciation of Wilson's skill in bringing that imagination to life.

Robert C. Ross 2009