I heard that somewhere in the past 10 years or so, but don't recall where. —Dan _____________ P.S. Googling found one article that traces it back to the following article: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427391.600-alices-adventures-in-alg... <https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427391.600-alices-adventures-in-algebra-wonderland-solved> about whose validity I know nothing. But I find quite dubious its claim that the reason Dodgson had a riff in Alice in Wonderland on non-commutativity ("I mean <-what I-> say" vs. "I see <-what I-> eat") was because the conservative Dodgson loathed non-commutativity as contradicting the laws of ordinary numbers. But if he loved geometry as much as this article says he does, it's hard to believe he would loathe the symmetry group of the triangle.
On Dec 29, 2015, at 1:51 PM, Bernie Cosell <bernie@fantasyfarm.com> wrote:
In today's times, in a completely random place [in the *sports* section, I think] I ran into this statement:
... Lewis Carroll was a pseudonym for Charles Dodgson, a mathematics prof at Oxford, and Alice in Wonderland was born out of his antipathy for new mathematical concepts in the late 1800s. Math had been pretty straight-forward up until then, so Dodgson created a world based on abstract math to show that being on drugs made more sense than embracing new, ridiculous concepts. Wonderland was born out of spite!
Alice was a representation of a Euclidian mathematician while Wonderland stood for Christ Church College at Oxford, where Dodgson worked.
I've *NEVER* heard this "analysis" of Alice before [and the "new mathematical concepts" date to Gauss's, et alia, work in the early-to-mid 1800s, don't they?]. Have any of you ever heard anything like this? I think it is pretty unlikely....