Have to read the book again, with these perpective in mind...
Alice’s adventures have often been assumed to be based purely on wild imagination Yet Dodgson most likely had real models for the strange happenings Alice has slid down from a world governed by the logic of universal arithmetic to one where her size can vary from nine feet to three inches “Being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.” No, it isn’t, replies the Caterpillar, who comes from the mad world of symbolic algebra “Keep your temper.” In Dodgson’s day, intellectuals still understood “temper” to mean the proportions in which qualities were mixed so the Caterpillar is telling Alice not to avoid getting angry but to stay in proportion “A Mad Tea-Party,” we should read tea-party as t-party, with t being the mathematical symbol for time At the mad tea party, time is the absent fourth presence at the table How do we know for sure that “Alice” was making fun of the new math? Dodgson rarely wrote amusing nonsense Math gave “Alice” a darker side |
clipped from www.nytimes.com
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