Charles Dodgson was an Oxford based mathematician who lived in the nineteenth century. He had a slight stutter and deafness in one ear from a childhood infection, and possible suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy. He loved Euclid and geometry and the grounded logic of mathematical proofs, but was not especially well regarded as an academic. He loved being around young children and enjoyed making up stories to tell them*. Writing under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, this is what he became known for. The most famous of his books is Alice in Wonderland. The book tells the story of Alice as she follows a white rabbit down a rabbit hole and then experiences a series of bizarre and mind-bending encounters with fantastic anthropomorphic beings. Along the way she eats things which seem to change her size, often in inconsistent or uneven ways. I used to think this provided a useful scenario for the teaching of ratio in math classes, but I was wrong. This was Dodgson attacking his contemporary mathematician and in particular the illogical nature of things like symbolic algebra and imaginary numbers which they supported. Dodgson disagreed with the way these concepts took mathematics away from being reality based and into the realm of the absurd [with emphasis on the ‘surd’ *grin*].
“This may again reflect Dodgson’s love of Euclidean geometry, where absolute magnitude doesn’t matter: what’s important is the ratio of one length to another when considering the properties of a triangle, for example. To survive in Wonderland, Alice must act like a Euclidean geometer, keeping her ratios constant, even if her size changes. Of course, she doesn’t. She swallows a piece of mushroom and her neck grows like a serpent with predictably chaotic results – until she balances her shape with a piece from the other side of the mushroom.”1
There are many other examples and you can read a fuller description of the hidden mathematics via the links below. Most people reading the book would not pick up on this as being an attack on mathematics, which is what I like about it. Many authors who included attacks on people or ideas make them so thinly veiled as to be transparent (see my previous post about one such incident), so it is nice to read one which is subtle enough that you’d have to be in the know to appreciate it.
On the flipside, Alice in Wonderland lends its distorted perceptions and weird size relationships to a syndrome – Alice in Wonderland Syndrome (AIWS). AIWS is a neurological disorder characterised by sufferers experiencing distortions in their visual perception of objects, such as things appearing smaller (micropsia) or larger (macropsia), or appearing to be closer (pelopsia) or further away (teleopsia) than they are. Distortion may also occur for senses other than vision, but vision is the key symptom.
Causes of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome are currently uncertain, but it has often been associated with migraines, head trauma, or viral encephalitis caused by the Epstein-Barr virus (NB: Epstein-Barr also causes mono/glandular fever). It is also theorized that AIWS can be caused by abnormal amounts of electrical activity, resulting in abnormal blood flow in those parts of the brain that process visual perception and texture.
Although there are cases of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome in both adolescents and adults, it is most commonly seen in children and the prevalence might surprise you – a study of Japanese students found 9% experienced the symptoms of AIWS.3 So the next time you read the great moment in literature that is Alice in Wonderland, you might be surprised at the additional things you notice.
Next time I’ll talk about an unusual relationship between a movie star and a poet who could best be described as frenemies.
- https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427391-600-alices-adventures-in-algebra-wonderland-solved/
- https://www.thecuriousreader.in/features/alice-in-wonderland-math/
- https://www.jaacap.org/article/S0890-8567(09)65466-6/pdf
*Some biographers assert that due to Carroll’s lack of interest in adult romantic relationships and this tendency toward young females (including photographing them naked) meant that he was likely a pedophile. This has been disputed by other biographers who show evidence from his diaries that he was interested in adult women and that his feeling towards young girls was in line with the contemporary Victorian view of aestheticism. Carroll’s wikipedia page covers the issue and has links to further reading. This post is not about Carroll’s sexuality, nor does it seek to form a view on the nature of it, but to not mention the debate at all seems wrong, hence this footnote.
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Robert New 
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