Mathematician:Charles Lutwidge Dodgson

From ProofWiki
(Redirected from Mathematician:Lewis Carroll)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Mathematician

English mathematician and logician, Anglican priest and author of children's books.

He is best known nowadays for his Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, not (on the surface) works of mathematics.

His actual mathematical works tended to be idiosyncratic, often focused on making mathematical concepts (in particular, logical syllogisms) accessible to children.

One of the first to treat logical elements with symbols, thus contributing to the birth of symbolic logic.


The surname Dodgson is pronounced Dodson.


Nationality

English


History

  • Born: 27 January 1832 in Daresbury, England
  • Died: 14 January 1898 in Guildford, England


Theorems and Definitions

Results named for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson can be found here.


Publications

  • 1860: A Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry
  • 1860: Two Books of Euclid
  • 1861: The Formulae of Plane Trigonometry
  • 1865: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (as by Lewis Carroll)
  • 1866: Condensation of Determinants
  • 1867: Elementary Treatise on Determinants
  • 1871: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (as by Lewis Carroll)
  • 1874: Examples in Arithmetic
  • 1874: The Hunting of the Snark (as by Lewis Carroll)
  • 1879: Euclid and his Modern Rivals
  • 1884: Parliamentary Elections
  • 1884: The Principles of Parliamentary Representation
  • 1888: Curiosa Mathematica, Part I: A New Theory of Parallels
  • 1889: Sylvie and Bruno (as by Lewis Carroll)
  • 1893: Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (as by Lewis Carroll)
  • 1893: Curiosa Mathematica, Part II: Pillow Problems thought out during Sleepless Nights
  • 1896: Symbolic Logic Part I


Both Symbolic Logic Part I and Symbolic Logic Part II are available repackaged as Lewis Carroll's Symbolic Logic, edited by William Warren Bartley, III.


Notable Quotes

The different branches of Arithmetic -- Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.
-- The Mock Turtle (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)
-- Quoted in 1937: Eric Temple Bell: Men of Mathematics: They Say: What Say They? : Let Them Say


"And you do Addition?" the White Queen asked. "What's one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?'
-- Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
-- Quoted as an epigraph to Chapter $2$ of 2008: David Joyner: Adventures in Group Theory (2nd ed.)


Also known as

Charles Dodgson was far better known as Lewis Carroll, the nom de plume under which he wrote his works for children.

It has been suggested that Lewis Carroll can be considered to be a modernisation of le wis carle, which is approximately old English for the wise man.

However, the alias actually arises from:

A variation of Lutwidge for Lewis
The Latin form of Charles (that is, Carolus) for Carroll.


Sources