I have a dubious theory about Alice in Wonderland
for you, if you're quite interested
'A dubious theory from Stephen Fry'
Yes
Alice in Wonderland isn't a wildly imaginative
children's fantasy after all
It's a bitter satirical attack on Victorian
mathematics. Dubious or not,
visit aliceschmalice.co.uk
to review the evidence and decide for yourself.
'A dubious theory from Stephen Fry'
A: I like that one I like that one a lot
S: It's an interesting theory
and there's a book written about it. The fact is, as you know,
Alice in Wonderland was written by...
A: Lewis Carroll
S: Who was in real life...?
A: A dog
S: A dog?
S: The last letter was wrong .
R: It was a don.
S: A doN
S: A don, that's right
In other words, he was a fellow of a-
A: Autocorrect, autocorrect, damn you autocorrect
S: He was a mathematician at Oxford
and he was a very Conservative
classical mathematician, who believed in
euclidean geometry and things like that
and there was a new world coming into maths
that would result in David Hilbert's famous questions and the
Poincaré conjecture and Riemann's hypothesis and
all the things that
Alan Turing and later mathematicians
D: The invention of number 9 of course, very controversial
I've never taken to it myself
S: Squeezed it in between 7 and 10 and
uh, 8 and 10 in fact
D: Yeah
8 came even later 
S: 8 came later that's right
D: They needed it for the war
S: They needed it for bingo I think
No but the fact is he didn't like the way that
maths was becoming, so extraordinarily abstract
and pure, and less to do with
either symbolic logic, which was his particular subject,
or as I say the beauty of plain geometry which he loved
and so this particular author
Melanie Bailey argues that
the scenes particulary: 'The Mad Hatter's Tea Party'
'The Encounter with the Hookah Smoking Caterpillar' and
'The Meeting with the Duchess's Baby Turns Into a Pig'
All that sort of absolute nonsense
he thought typified modern mathematics
and most of all, he added in the
later story, 'The Cheshire Cat' who disappears leaving only
a grin, it's a humourous way of making a serious point about the
futility of abstraction, 'how can the cat
leave a grin behind?' The cat was
brilliantly played in the Tim Burton film by...
Who did the voice of the cat?
A: UGH
S:Oh God
A: Hugh Laurie
S: Huge Laurie that was it
S: Minus 2000 points
Anyway, uh, Melanie Bailey, the author of this book, reminds us that his other works
are painfully dull and moralistic or very technical works.
In fact, Queen Victoria read Alice
and loved it so much and said, "I do hope,
Doctor Johnson, that you will dedicate your next book to me."
So he wrote a book called something like 'Problems in Symbolic Logic'
Her Majesty Victoria must've read it and thought 'What the fuck is this?'
D: Queen Victoria Bumper Book of Boring Maths
Happy Christmas Your Majesty
S: Anyway
She says, this lady Melanie, mainly that Dodgson was 'most witty
when he was poking fun at something, and only then,
when the subject matter truly got him riled', whereas we think of him as just an absurdist.
a kind of surrealist, as a nonsense- a master of nonsense.
Anyway,
it's nice to have dubious theories on our J series and that's one of them.
