Alice

Every few years someone rediscovers that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are really books about mathematics. The argument is bang on. After all, their author, Lewis Carroll, was actually Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematician and logician. Wonderland is full of cards. Looking-Glass is structured around a chess game. Scholars have spent decades identifying hidden references to logic, symbolic reasoning, geometry, inversions, transformations, and mathematical paradoxes. And maybe they might be right.

But hold on. Let me paraphrase Winston Churchill, both books often read like "a phantasmagoria of a fevered dream." Think about what actually happens. Alice drinks from a mysterious bottle and her perception of reality changes dramatically. She eats another substance and her body changes again. Later she encounters a caterpillar sitting on a giant mushroom calmly dispensing cryptic advice. One side of the mushroom has one effect; the other side has another. A cat appears and disappears at will until only its grin remains hanging in space. If someone described this sequence to me today without mentioning the title, I might assume they were recounting an adventurous weekend at a music festival.

It doesn't stop there. Animals speak with complete confidence while saying things that make no sense. Time itself behaves strangely. Identity becomes fluid. Size, distance, logic, and causality refuse to stay fixed. Every attempt Alice makes to impose ordinary reasoning on the world is met with a new layer of absurdity. The experience feels less like solving a mathematical proof and more like trying to explain a dream immediately after waking up. That's what fascinates me.

Modern readers often search for the hidden code. Was this a commentary on Victorian mathematics? A satire of logic? A critique of contemporary educational methods? A cleverly disguised lesson in symbolic reasoning?

Perhaps. But maybe we sometimes over intellectualise things because we're uncomfortable with wonder. A mathematician can dream. A logician can be absurd. An academic can stare at a mushroom and think, "This would make a wonderful character." Perhaps the enduring genius of Lewis Carroll lies not in the mathematics hidden inside the stories but in his willingness to abandon mathematics altogether. The books constantly flirt with logic before gleefully pushing it off a cliff.

The Mad Hatter's tea party is not memorable because it teaches formal reasoning. The Cheshire Cat is not beloved because it illustrates a theorem. The Queen of Hearts is not terrifying because she demonstrates a mathematical principle. The walrus and the carpenter are not haunting because of the logic used to persuade a generation of oysters to meet their doom. 

We remember them because they inhabit the strange territory where dreams, nonsense, imagination, and logic collide. Of course, the mathematicians are probably correct. The chessboard structure of Through the Looking-Glass is too deliberate to be accidental. The card motifs in Wonderland clearly invite symbolic interpretation. Carroll's professional background inevitably shaped what he wrote. But when I read the books, I don't feel as though I'm watching a mathematician constructing a puzzle.   I feel as though I'm watching a brilliant mind let itself wander. Perhaps that is why the books have survived for more than 150 years. I love em and love re-reading them; there is always something to learn. Children read them as adventures. Literary critics read them as satire. Mathematicians read them as logic. Psychologists read them as explorations of identity.

And then some of us read them wondering what, exactly, Lewis Carroll had been smoking.

Whatever it was, it must be some recipe.

C