Lewis Carroll's books have delighted children and adults for generations, but behind their exuberant fantasy and delightful nonsense was the mind of a brilliant mathematician. Now his forgotten achievements in the world of numbers are brought to light by acclaimed author and mathematician Robin Wilson. Here he explores the curious imagination of a man whose pioneering work at Oxford University included investigations into voting patterns and tennis seeding, who dreamt up numerical conundrums in bed at night and who filled his writings with problems, paradoxes, puzzles and teasing games of logic. Taking us into a world of mock turtles and maps, gryphons and gravity, Lewis Carroll in Numberland reveals the singular mind of a genius.

As Wilson demonstrates, Carroll--who published serious, if occasionally eccentric, works in the fields of geometry, logic, and algebra--made significant contributions to subjects as varied as voting patterns and the design of tennis tournaments, in the process creating imaginative recreational puzzles based on mathematical ideas. --from publisher description.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson is best known for his 'Alice' books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, written under his pen name of Lewis Carroll. Yet, whilst lauded for his work in children's fiction and his pioneering work in the world of Victorian photography, his everyday job was a lecturer in Mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford University. The Mathematical World of Charles L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) explores the academic background behind this complex individual, outlining his mathematical life, describing his writings in geometry, algebra, logic, the theory of voting, and recreational mathematics, before going on to discuss his mathematical legacy. This is the first academic work that collects the research on Dodgson's wide-ranging mathematical achievements into a single practical volume. Much material appears here for the first time, such as Dodgson's personal letters and drawings, as well as the results of recent investigations into the life and work of Dodgson. Complementing this are many illustrations, both historical and explanatory, as well as a full mathematical bibliography of Dodgson's mathematical publications.

A new biography of Lewis Carroll, just in time for the release of Tim Burton's all-star Alice in Wonderland Lewis Carroll was brilliant, secretive and self contradictory. He reveled in double meanings and puzzles, in his fiction and his life. Jenny Woolf's The Mystery of Lewis Carroll shines a new light on the creator of Alice In Wonderland and brings to life this fascinating, but sometimes exasperating human being whom some have tried to hide. Using rarely-seen and recently discovered sources, such as Carroll's accounts ledger and unpublished correspondence with the "real" Alice's family, Woolf sets Lewis Carroll firmly in the context of the English Victorian age and answers many intriguing questions about the man who wrote the Alice books, such as: • Was it Alice or her older sister that caused him to break with the Liddell family? • How true is the gossip about pedophilia and certain adult women that followed him? • How true is the "romantic secret" which many think ruined Carroll's personal life? • Who caused Carroll major financial trouble and why did Carroll successfully conceal that person's identity and actions? Woolf answers these and other questions to bring readers yet another look at one of the most elusive English writers the world has known.

The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading. Repetition and Identity offers a theory of the existing thing as such. A thing only has identity and consistency when it has already been repeated, but repetition summons difference and the shadow invocation of a connecting sign. In contrast to the perspectives of Post-structuralism, Catherine Pickstock proposes that signs are part of reality, and that they truthfully express the real. She also proposes that non-identical repetition involves analogy, rather than the Post-structuralist combination of univocity and equivocity, or of rationalism with scepticism. This proposal, which is happy for reality to make sense, involves, however, a subjective decision which is to be poetically performed. A wager is laid upon the possibility of a consistency which sustains the subject, in continuity with the elusive consistency of nature. This wager is played out in terms of a performative argument concerning the existential stances open to human beings. It is concluded that the individual sustains this quest within the context of an inter-subjective search for an historical consistency of culture. But can ethical consistency, and the harmonisation of this with an aesthetic surplus of an 'elsewhere', invoked by the sign, be achieved without a religious gesture? And can this gesture avoid a tragic tension between ethical commitment and religious renunciation? Pickstock suggests a Kierkegaardian re-reading of the Patristic categories of 'recapitulation' and 'reconstitution' can reconcile this tension. The quest for the identity and consistency of the thing leads us from the subject through fiction and history and to sacred history, to shape an ontology which is also a literary theory and a literary artefaction.

To open a newspaper or turn on the television it would appear that science and religion are polar opposites - mutually exclusive bedfellows competing for hearts and minds. There is little indication of the rich interaction between religion and science throughout history, much of which continues today. From ancient to modern times, mathematicians have played a key role in this interaction. This is a book on the relationship between mathematics and religious beliefs. It aims to show that, throughout scientific history, mathematics has been used to make sense of the 'big' questions of life, and that religious beliefs sometimes drove mathematicians to mathematics to help them make sense of the world. Containing contributions from a wide array of scholars in the fields of philosophy, history of science and history of mathematics, this book shows that the intersection between mathematics and theism is rich in both culture and character. Chapters cover a fascinating range of topics including the Sect of the Pythagoreans, Newton's views on the apocalypse, Charles Dodgson's Anglican faith and Gödel's proof of the existence of God.

The book provides the first state-of-the-art overview of Alice in Wonderland syndrome, an enigmatic neurological condition characterised by perceptual distortions (for example, seeing things as being larger or smaller than they actually are; seeing human faces change into animal faces; feeling one’s body growing larger or smaller; experiencing time as slowing down or speeding up; etc.). It describes the clinical presentation of the syndrome, including its huge variety of symptoms and the variability of its natural course. The book starts out with several vivid case vignettes from the author’s clinical practice, and then explains how and why the concept was introduced. In addition, it explains what is currently known about the underlying medical conditions and brain mechanisms, proposes a diagnostic algorithm, and makes recommendations for treatment. Throughout the book, a recurring question is whether or not Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) suffered from the symptoms he described so aptly in his famous children’s book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Accordingly, the book should appeal to anyone interested in the brain and its disorders, as well as readers interested in the life of Lewis Carroll.

'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked. 'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat. 'We're all mad here.' The 'Alice' books are two of the most translated, most quoted, and best-known books in the world, but what exactly are they? Apparently delightful, innocent fantasies for children, they are also complex textures of mathematical, linguistic, and philosophical jokes. Alice's encounters with the White Rabbit, the Cheshire-Cat, the King and Queen of Hearts, the Mad Hatter, Tweedledum and Tweedledee and many other extraordinary characters have made them masterpieces of carefree nonsense, yet they also appeal to adults on a quite different level. Layers of satire, allusion, and symbolism about Victorian culture and politics, as well as revelations about the intricate subconscious problems of their author, add to their fascination and make them impossible to classify. This new edition explores the phenomenal range of reference, and the paradoxical appeal of two of the most inventive books in world literature. It also includes an episode removed by Carroll from the proofs of Through the Looking-Glass, called 'The Wasp in a Wig'. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

First published in 1865, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland began as a story told to Alice Liddell and her two sisters on a boating trip in July 1862. The novel follows Alice down a rabbit-hole and into a world of strange and wonderful characters who constantly turn everything upside down with their mind-boggling logic, word play, and fantastic parodies. Like the first, this second edition includes Carroll’s earlier story Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, which allows readers to trace the revisions and to compare Carroll’s own illustrations in the original with the famous John Tenniel illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This edition also includes new appendix material: George MacDonald writing on the fantastic, the eighteenth-century children’s story Goody Two-Shoes, a section on film and television adaptations of Alice, and new illustrations.

The first collected and annotated edition of Carroll's brilliant, witty poems, edited by Gillian Beer. 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe...' wrote Lewis Carroll in his wonderfully playful poem of nonsense verse, 'Jabberwocky'. This new edition collects together the marvellous range of Carroll's poetry, including nonsense verse, parodies, burlesques, and more. Alongside the title piece are such enduringly wonderful pieces as 'The Walrus and the Carpenter', 'The Mock Turtle's Song', 'Father William' and many more. This edition also includes notes, a chronology and an introduction by Gillian Beer that discusses Carroll's love of puzzles and wordplay and the relationship of his poetry with the Alice books 'Opening at random Gillian Beer's new edition of Lewis Carroll's poems, Jabberwocky and Other Nonsense, guarantees a pleasurable experience - not all of it nonsensical' - Times Literary Supplement Lewis Carroll was the pen-name of the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Born in 1832, he was educated at Rugby School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he was appointed lecturer in mathematics in 1855, and where he spent the rest of his life. In 1861 he took deacon's orders, but shyness and a stammer prevented him from seeking the priesthood. His most famous works, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872), were originally written for Alice Liddell, the daughter of the Dean of his college. Charles Dodgson died of bronchitis in 1898. Gillian Beer is King Edward VII Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Cambridge and past President of Clare Hall College. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature. Among her works are Darwin's Plots (1983; third edition, 2009), George Eliot (1986), Arguing with the Past: Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sidney (1989), Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (1996) and Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (1996).