http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780713997576,00.html
A biographical study of the Christ Church mathematician and logician, Charles Dodgson, looking, in particular, at the common themes between his academic work and his more popular writings as Lewis Carroll.
Hard not to like a book that manages to incorporate the chapter title ‘Here’s looking at Euclid’ – and then goes on to make Euclid moderately accessible to a non-mathematician.
The biographical and contextual elements of the book are pared to a minimum, making space for reproducing a number of the problems on which Dodgson worked and extensive quotations from correspondence and published works. My favourite extract was from a teasing letter from Dodgson regarding an algebraic paradox:
Ever since this painful fact has been forced upon me, I have not slept more than eight hours a night, and have not been able to eat more than 3 meals a day.
The strength of the book lies in its explanation of Dodgson’s mathematical work and the commonality of themes with his more famous works as Lewis Carroll. In terms of historical context, I found it slightly more frustrating. There was some lovely anecdotal detail, such as Dodgson’s pseudo-mathematical argument for calculating the salary of the professor of Greek – a satirical take on a contemporary University debate about the salary of Benjamin Jowett. I did, of course, scour the later pages for reference to Dodgson’s later work on symbolic logic, given the ‘intersection’ (ahem…) with John Venn. Euler’s and Venn’s diagrams are used as a way in to introducing Dodgson’s own preference for square drawings, rather than intersecting circles, in order to represent more easily more than three terms, and also to ensure that the universe was ‘cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d’ in a way in which Venn’s was not.
As a result of reading this book, I can feel marginally more educated the next time I go into Starbucks and ask, ‘May I have a large container of coffee?’, in the knowledge that I am simultaneously recalling the first few digits of π (by counting the number of letters in each word of the phrase 3.1415926). I always knew coffee was good for me!
