Alice In Wonderland’s Secret Ingredient: Math : NPR
John Tenniel/iStockphoto.com
John Tenniel/iStockphoto.com
The primary numbers that come to thoughts when excited about Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland could be how a lot cash the film is raking in on the field workplace.
However numbers additionally seem like woven in among the many speaking rabbits and smoking caterpillars of the unique tales. Creator Lewis Carroll was additionally a math instructor in Oxford, England, and mathematicians say the Alice books are filled with algebraic classes — reminiscent of why a raven is sort of a writing desk.
That is the riddle the Mad Hatter asks Alice. And, as Weekend Version Math Man Keith Devlin tells NPR’s Jacki Lyden, “That individual scene — and many different scenes in Alice in Wonderland — have been a mirrored image on the rising abstraction that was happening in arithmetic within the nineteenth century.”
Carroll, whose actual title was Charles Dodgson, was a really conservative, conventional mathematician, Devlin says, and he did not just like the modifications some have been bringing to the self-discipline of arithmetic.
“To him, algebra was all about numbers,” Devlin says. However within the nineteenth century, individuals have been growing every kind of weird new algebras, the place x instances y was not equal to y instances x.
So why is a raven like a writing desk? As a result of the brand new arithmetic did not make sense to Carroll. “Numerous issues that each commonsense individual would say are completely different on this new arithmetic turned out to be the identical,” Devlin says — a degree Carroll discovered ripe for satire.
Lacking Time At The Tea Celebration
So beneath the insanity of the Wonderland tea social gathering lies math — and a few snark. Alice finds the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse at their tea social gathering, however Devlin says Carroll intentionally overlooked one character.
Johnny Depp performs the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland.
Courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc.
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Courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc.
Johnny Depp performs the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland.
Courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc.
“One of many massive developments that was happening at the moment … was work by an Irish mathematician known as William Hamilton,” Devlin explains. Carroll wasn’t a fan of Hamilton’s work, a brand new arithmetic known as quaternions. “Quaternions have been numbers — to not take care of counting issues, however to take care of understanding rotations.
“Again in Victorian instances, when Hamilton himself was doing this work, he tried to grasp his new arithmetic in bodily phrases,” Devlin says. “He stated one of many 4 phrases that was concerned in these numbers needed to be time. So time was inexplicably, inescapably certain up with these new numbers.”
But it is the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse on the tea social gathering — the character Time is absent. (You possibly can learn the chapter here in case your reminiscence wants refreshing.)
“What Hamilton stated was in case you take this time parameter out of those new numbers, then the numbers would simply maintain rotating round — they will not go wherever,” Devlin says. “It was similar to the characters rotating spherical and around the tea social gathering, spherical and around the desk.”
“The truth is, when the Hatter and the Hare attempt to squeeze the Dormouse into the teapot, they’re attempting to one way or the other get away from this complexity — throw away one other of the parameters, in case you like — in order that life can resume as regular.”
Devlin says Carroll’s message is that we “do away with all of this complexity within the first place, and let’s simply return to the acquainted previous geometry that we have had since Euclid for two,000 years.”
Fictional Math
The hidden math in Alice might come as a shock to many, however mathematicians have all the time identified Carroll was slipping some numbers into his fiction.
“We knew that Carroll was truly a mathematician,” Devlin says. “Final 12 months, the truth is, a scholar in Oxford known as Melanie Bayley wrote a complete dissertation analyzing Alice In Wonderland, and he or she recognized plenty of mathematical allusions within the story.”
With out Carroll’s secret ingredient, Alice may by no means have achieved her fame. “The very first model of [the] Alice in Wonderland story — that he wrote for the real Alice — had not one of the arithmetic,” Devlin says. “He added a variety of new materials and it is all of that new materials the place you discover the mathematical allusions.
“Virtually definitely what he did was stated, ‘This is this cute story that I’ve written for this actual Alice. I’ll take that and I’ll use it to do that depraved satire of what I believe are these loopy, silly developments in arithmetic which are getting us away from the true, strong arithmetic that I’ve liked all my life.’ “