![]() ![]() ![]() I'm going to take that and I'm going to use it to do this wicked satire of what I think are these crazy, stupid developments in mathematics that are getting us away from the real, solid mathematics that I've loved all my life.As the play opens in an English parlor, Alice’s mother is busily preparing for a party later that day – which, as she reminds Alice, is “just for grown-ups.” Alice is impatient, wanting to experience and be a part of everything in a “grown-up” world. "Almost certainly what he did was said, 'Here's this cute story that I've written for this real Alice. "He added a lot of new material and it's all of that new material where you find the mathematical allusions. "The very first version of Alice in Wonderland story - that he wrote for the real Alice - had none of the mathematics," Devlin says. Without Carroll's secret ingredient, Alice might never have achieved her fame. "Last year, in fact, a scholar in Oxford called Melanie Bayley wrote a complete dissertation analyzing Alice In Wonderland, and she identified a number of mathematical allusions in the story." "We knew that Carroll was actually a mathematician," Devlin says. The hidden math in Alice may come as a surprise to many, but mathematicians have always known Carroll was slipping some numbers into his fiction. "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."ĭevlin 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." ![]() "It was just like the characters rotating round and round the tea party, round and round the table." "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. ![]() (You can read the chapter here if your memory needs refreshing.) Yet it's the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse at the tea party - the character Time is absent. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |