Is Alice in Wonderland really about drugs?

[Joe Allonby]

First, we have to remind ourselves of what was going on in mathematics
in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when Dodgson wrote his
story. It was a turbulent period for mathematicians, with the subject
rapidly becoming more abstract. The discoveries of non-Euclidean
geometries, the development of abstract (symbolic) algebra that was
not tied to arithmetic or geometry, and the growing acceptance - or at
least use - of "imaginary numbers" were just some of the developments
that shook the discipline to its core. By all accounts, Dodgson held a
very traditionalist view of mathematics, rooted in the axiomatic
approach of Euclid's Elements. (He was not a research mathematician,
rather he tutored the subject.) Bayley describes him as a "stubbornly
conservative mathematician," who was dismayed by what he saw as the
declining standards of rigor. The new material Dodgson added to the
Alice story for publication, she says, was a wicked satire on those
new developments.


http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_10.html
On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 4:40 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> Contemporary social commentary, more likely.
>
>
> On Monday, August 20, 2012, Joe Allonby wrote:
>>
>> I thought it was about irrational numbers.
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 5:08 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19254839