Is Alice in Wonderland really about drugs?

[Bekah]

Here's some more about the math in Alice in Wonderland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice's_Adventures_in_Wonderland#Symbolism

Chapter 1, "After a while, finding that nothing more happened, she decided on going into the garden at once;  but alas for poor ALice. 

** "alas for poor Alice!" Did Carroll intend a pun on "alas"? It is hard to be sure, but there is no question about the intent in Finnegans Wake when James Joyce writes, "Alicious, twinstreams twinestrains, through alluring glass or alas in jumboland?"  (Viking Revised 1958 - p.528)    And again (page 207) "Though Wonderlawn's lost us for ever. Alis, alas, she brokethe glass! Liddell lokker through the leafery, ours is a mistery of pain."  

For the hundreds of references to Dodgson and the Alice books in Finnegans Wake see Ann McGarrity Buki's excellent paper "Lewis Carroll in Finnegans Wake" in Lewis  Carroll : A  Celebration." (Clarkson N. Potter, 1982)  . 

All this from my copy of "The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, Lewis Carol"  by Martin Gardner with original illustrations by John Tenneel. 

Bekah



On Aug 23, 2012, at 12:15 PM, Bekah wrote:

> From Alice in Wonderland 
> 
> Number theory: 
> Chapter 2    "Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is—oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!" 
> 
> ME:  There are two ways to think about this.  First she quite simply won't get to 20 because generally the multiplication tables end at 12 x ?  - at least in elementary school!  
> 
> But second (and more interesting),  if 4x5 does in fact equal 12 then she has to be using a base 18 number system. And if 4x6 does in fact equal 13 then that base  be 21.  Do we see a pattern?  If yes,  what is 4x7 going to be -  answer - 14 from a base of 24.  She'll never get to what we know as 20 because continuing that pattern,  
> 4x8 = 15 (base 27)  
> 4x9 = 16  (base 30)   
> 4x10 = 17 (base 33)  
> 4x11 = 18 (base 36)    
> 4x12 = 19 (base 39)  
> 4x13 = 20??? (base 42)     BIG OOPS!   Base 42 cannot have 20 at this point  - it has to be a 1(A = 1A) 
> 
> ************
> Chapter 7
> 
> "The Hatter was the first to break the silence. `What day of the month is it?' he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his pocket, and was looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his ear.
> 
> Alice considered a little, and then said `The fourth.'
> 
> `Two days wrong!' sighed the Hatter. `I told you butter wouldn't suit the works!' he added looking angrily at the March Hare.
> 
> ME:   They're at the center of the earth going on lunar (-tic) "time."   But those missing hours will be needed later on when they get to the endlessly rotating chairs -  they're missing "time."  
> 
> ********
> 
> Quaternions  (like that?)  (g)
> 
> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124632317
> 
> "One of the big developments that was going on at that time ... was work by an Irish mathematician called William Hamilton," Devlin explains. Carroll wasn't a fan of Hamilton's work, a new arithmetic called quaternions. "Quaternions were numbers — not to deal with counting things, but to deal with understanding rotations.
> 
> "Back in Victorian times, when Hamilton himself was doing this work, he tried to understand his new arithmetic in physical terms," Devlin says. "He said one of the four terms that was involved in these numbers had to be time. So time was inexplicably, inescapably bound up with these new numbers."
> 
> Yet it's the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse at the tea party — the character Time is absent. (You can read the chapter here if your memory needs refreshing.  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124632317    )
> 
> "What Hamilton said was if you take this time parameter out of these new numbers, then the numbers would just keep rotating around — they won't go anywhere," Devlin says. "It was just like the characters rotating round and round the tea party, round and round the table."
> 
> "In fact, when the Hatter and the Hare try to squeeze the Dormouse into the teapot, they're trying to somehow get away from this complexity — throw away another of the parameters, if you like — so that life can resume as normal."
> 
> Devlin says Carroll's message is that we "get rid of all of this complexity in the first place, and let's just go back to the familiar old geometry that we've had since Euclid for 2,000 years."
> 
> ****
> 
> Just as complex numbers work with two terms, quaternions belong to a number system based on four terms.   Hamilton spent years working with three terms - one for each dimension of space - but could only make them rotate in a plane. When he added the fourth, he got the three-dimensional rotation he was looking for, but he had trouble conceptualizing what this extra term meant. Like most Victorians, he assumed this term had to mean something, so in the preface to his Lectures on Quaternions of 1853 he added a footnote: "It seemed (and still seems) to me natural to connect this extra-spatial unit with the conception of time."
> 
> As Bayley points out, the parallels between Hamilton's mathematics and the Mad Hatter's tea party are uncanny. Alice is now at a table with three strange characters: the Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse. The character Time, who has fallen out with the Hatter, is absent, and out of pique he won't let the Hatter move the clocks past six.
> 
> Reading this scene with Hamilton's ideas in mind, the members of the Hatter's tea party represent three terms of a quaternion, in which the all-important fourth term, time, is missing. Without Time, we are told, the characters are stuck at the tea table, constantly moving round to find clean cups and saucers.
> 
> 
> http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_10.html
> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427391.600-alices-adventures-in-algebra-wonderland-solved.html?full=true
> 
> 
> That's enough for now -  
> 
> Bek
> 
> On Aug 23, 2012, at 10:08 AM, Joe Allonby wrote:
> 
>> 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
>