Is Alice in Wonderland really about drugs?

[Mark Kohut]

Yes, I say Yes, this A in W satire of the "new' math is more like what TRP is doing with the advanced math
in AtD......


________________________________
From: Joe Allonby <joeallonby at gmail.com>
To: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> 
Cc: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>; pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2012 12:08 PM
Subject: Re: Is Alice in Wonderland really about drugs?

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
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