Showing posts with label Charles Lutwidge Dodson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Charles Lutwidge Dodson. Show all posts

Sunday, June 8, 2014

Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Literary works by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898, aka Lewis Carroll) are crammed with mentions of mathematics.   One of my favorites (found here with numerous others, including "Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, Derision") is this exchange from Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

          "Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."
          "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen.  "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day.  Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

                                                                                       Alice in Wonderland 

Monday, February 10, 2014

To love, in perfect syllables

     While looking for Valentine verse with a math connection, I opened my copy of The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll (Chancellor Press, 1982).  And found this one in which Carroll (a pen name for English mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodson (1832-1898)) uses the word one twice and the word half twice and has counted sounds so that in each line the number of syllables is either a cube of an integer or is perfect.

        Lesson in Latin     by Lewis Carroll    (May 1888)