Was his day job, Carroll’s and consequently Alice In Wonderland’s , only connection to mathematics? Unlikely. He was a conservative and passionate mathematician who by most accounts was distressed by all the new theories in mathematics that were being sloshed about. It is believed by many that Alice In Wonderland was, in fact, a mathematical satire and Carroll’s way of belittling and perhaps even maintaining equilibrium in the face of dramatic change. Magic mushrooms, babies turning into pigs, and absurd questions (‘why is a raven like a writing desk?’) were perhaps, all meant to show how pointless and annoying these new theories were.

An idle day on the Thames was made interesting by the story of a little girl called Alice who falls into a rabbit hole as she chases a clothed white rabbit that runs past her while hurriedly consulting a pocket watch. What is the story without the encounter with the hookah-smoking caterpillar; the meeting with the duchess whose baby turns into a pig; and the tea party with the Mad Hatter and the March Hare? However, all of these elements were added later by the author, possibly to ridicule contemporary mathematicians who were busy postulating new-fangled theories that departed from actual observable reality.

Dodgson liked good, old-fashioned no-nonsense algebra and Euclidean geometry – areas of study that could prove things about the natural world. It was really as simple as saying that given a point and a line, there is exactly one line through the point that is in the same plane as the given line and never intersects it. Now imagine a time where professors and students of mathematics were dabbling with “alternate theories” that attempted to prove that one plus one might not equal to two. The very thought was blasphemous to someone like Dodgson.

So he turned to prose to share his contempt and dislike for these crazy, new things.