Are you bored from reality? Then follow the White Rabbit as Alice did.
Lewis Carroll was an English Mathematician, photographer, Anglican Cleric and logician. He was born in 1832 in Cheshire, England. According to a lot of biographers he was a paedophile since he had a lot of child girlfriends, and he made photos and drawings of few of them as nude.
In 1856 he met with Henry Liddell and his family. He became a good friend of Henry's wife and children, especially three children Lorina, Edith and Alice. On 4 July 1862, in a rowing boat travelling on the Isis from Folly Bridge, Oxford to Godstow for a picnic outing, Alice asked Lewis Carroll to entertain her and her sisters, Edith and Lorina, with a story. As the Reverend Robinson Duckworth rowed the boat, Dodgson regaled the girls with fantastic stories of a girl, named Alice, and her adventures after she fell into a rabbit-hole.
In 1865, Lewis Carroll rewrote and collected the stories and they were published with illustrations of John Tenniel. It is one of the best examples of nonsense literary and one of the first fantastic novel had been written. Since Carroll was logician and mathematician you can trace a lot of mathematical and logical quotes in his book. Some of them are,
- If little girls eat eggs, then they are a kind of serpent (If P, then Q).
Alice (who is a little girl) eats eggs (P).
Therefore, she is a kind of serpent (Therefore, Q).
- If an animal growls when angry and wags its tail when pleased, it is not mad (If P, then Q).
I growl when pleased, and wag my tail when angry (Not P).
Therefore, I am mad (Therefore, not Q).
- The executioner's argument was, that you couldn't cut off a head unless there was a body to cut it off from: that he had never had to do such a thing before, and he wasn't going to begin at his time of life.
The King's argument was that anything that had a head could be beheaded, and that you weren't to talk nonsense.
The executioner's logic follows the Hatter's: you can't take something from nothing. The King argues that since the Cat has a head, he can be beheaded but beheaded from what?
- the March Hare, the Hatter, and the Dormouse give several examples in which the semantic value of a sentence A is not the same value of the converse of A (for example, "Why, you might just as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same thing as 'I eat what I see'!"); in logic and mathematics, this is discussing an inverse relationship.
- Alice is asked whether she wants "more tea", and objects that she can't have more because she hasn't had any. The Hatter corrects her: "You mean you can't take less: it's very easy to take more than nothing." This is a play on the allowability of inference in comparatives without "than".
- The Cheshire cat fades until it disappears entirely, leaving only its wide grin suspended in the air, leading Alice to marvel and note that she has seen a cat without a grin, but never a grin without a cat. This echoes ancient questions in logic about substances and predicates.
Though the main character's name of book is Alice, the stories were written to entertain Alice and her sisters and one of the acrostic poems in Through the Looking –Glass the second book of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland shows the name Alice Liddell, Lewis Carroll denied that Alice character was inspired from Alice Liddell. He claimed that he also used the name of Gertrude Chataway who was another child girlfriend of him, in acrostic poem and that does not show that he inspired from them. Probably reason of this denial was the cause of sudden termination of this relation with Alice Liddell in 1863. While some biographers argue Lewis wanted to marry Alice however her family did not give permission for such a marriage and this caused sudden termination, the other biographers argue the relation was over because of the close attention of Lorina sister of Alice to Lewis. The interesting point is only two pages of Carroll's diary were missed and these dates refer the termination of this relation.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has been adapted to several formats like cinema, live shows, comic books, music, electronic media or parodies many times. Many characters and events were used in several projects.
Follow the white rabbit... Knock, knock, Neo.
