This piece breaks down the mysterious fun of Lewis Carrol’s novel. All we ever really discussed during my GCE ‘A’ levels English Lit ‘S’ paper days were whether Carrol was a paedophile and skimmed through the different characters in the book.
I loved this interpretation of algebra and the different formulae involved with each character, it’s brilliant and I think this is a way more plausible interpretation than paedophilia, though I think his childhood played a large part in how the stories unfold.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Oriol Ferrer Mesià // Jan 2, 2010 at 8:25 am
Algebra to define characters? That sounds pretty insane, where did you see it?
2 Thom Van Dyke // Jan 12, 2010 at 11:28 am
who can ever appreciate and never ask for understanding in a world of ignorance and fear
3 baobabs // Jan 12, 2010 at 11:02 pm
Aristotle Hofer, is that the new scholarly name you go by?
4 baobabs // Jan 12, 2010 at 11:05 pm
Oriol, read the article.
The brilliant example is here:
“The parallels between Hamilton’s maths and the Hatter’s tea party - or perhaps it should read “t-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 maths 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.
Their movement around the table is reminiscent of Hamilton’s early attempts to calculate motion, which was limited to rotatations in a plane before he added time to the mix. Even when Alice joins the party, she can’t stop the Hatter, the Hare and the Dormouse shuffling round the table, because she’s not an extra-spatial unit like Time.”
5 In Praise of Everything Food Related // Mar 9, 2010 at 11:20 pm
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