“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
“No, I give it up,” Alice replied: “what’s the answer?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter.
“Nor I,” said the March Hare.
Alice sighed wearily. “I think you might do something better with the time,” she said, “than wasting it asking riddles with no answers.”
The classic children’s novels (beloved by all ages), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderlandand Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, take readers on a familiar journey down the rabbit hole and into a realm where Victorian sensibilities, imagination, and logic puzzles meet a host of characters from a rabbit with a waistcoat to the Queen of Hearts herself. Generations of readers have fallen in love with this humorous tale of things inside-out and upside-down, but mathematicians are particularly fond of the series as it was written by one of their own.
About the Author
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson became known to the world by the pseudonym “Lewis Carroll” when he translated his first two names into Latin as “Carolus Lodovicus”, then anglicized and reversed their order. His most famous works, written for children he knew, have become among the world’s most well-known satire stories. As a mathematical logician, Dodgson was interested in increasing understanding by treating it as a game. (Biographical source)
Other Resources
- TeachingBooks.net (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)
- TeachingBooks.net (Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There)
- 150 Years of the MacMillian Alice
The Math and Logic Puzzles of Lewis Carroll: Word play and riddles in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland were a side effect from his real job: math teacher. In this recorded talk, Stuart Moskowitz (Humboldt State University) looks at classic puzzles of the 1800s, and shows us complex notes and illustrations from Carroll’s notebooks. This lecture was part of the Spring 2017 Meeting of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America and the closing event for the San Francisco Public Library’s “The Illustrated Alice: The Imagining of Wonderland” exhibit.