Importance of Mathematics in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
In his essay "Alice's Journey to the End of Night," Donald Rackin describes Wonderland as "the chaotic land beneath the man-made groundwork of Western thought and convention" where virtually all sense of pattern is absent and chaos is consistent. Rackin claims that "there are the usual modes of thought-ordinary mathematics and logic: in Wonderland they possess absolutely no meaning." Rackin argues that our traditional view of mathematics as an existing set of facts and rules that are predictable does not hold true in Wonderland.1 However, Rackin's concept of mathematics is limited-he sees math as simply mathematical operations (multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction), which produce predictable results in our "logical" world. But mathematics also exists as abstract forms of structure, which indeed exist in Wonderland through sequence and measurement. Even though Alice's Adventures in Wonderland presents a world that appears random and full of nonsense and inconsistency, these mathematical forms are preserved in Wonderland.
Contemporary philosophies of mathematics define the subject as the study of patterns, as opposed to the traditional study of numbers. These patterns exist in many abstract forms, such as numeric patterns, spatial (visual reasoning) patterns, patterns of motion, and patterns of growth or decay. Rackin recognizes the breakdown of one specific pattern, specifically the relationship between factors and products in base ten multiplications. From this evidence, he concludes that mathematics is meaningless in Wonderland, with no defined structure. But Rackin is making this assertion bas...
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...ate on its own number system, completely foreign to us due to the limited examples of numbers and their role in the story. Putting the details aside, the idea of such structures challenge Rackin's idea that Wonderland is truly chaotic. But from the text, explicit numeric and spatial relationship patterns do exist in Wonderland, and that is enough to justify mathematical structure, according to the contemporary definition of mathematics.
Notes
1. Donald Rackin, "Alice's Journey to the End of Night," Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 81 (1966): 313.
2. Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice, ed. Martin Gardner (1960; New York: Wing Books, 1998), 38.
3. Martin Gardner, note to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in Carroll, 38n.
4. Carroll, 156.
5. Carroll, 72.
6. Carroll, 156.
7. Carroll, 130.
Seal, G. ( 2007). ANZAC: The scared in the secular. Journal of Australian Studies, 31(91), 135-144. doi: 10.1080/14443050709388135
You would think that Lewis Carroll an English author, mathematician and logician would sit down and write a logical, didactical novel, instead he wrote a novel of the literary nonsense genre. Unusual, is it not? Maybe we should take a closer look at Carroll's “nonsense“ and see why is it considered to be random, senseless, unpredictable, and without rules. Moreover, even justice is not spared of parody, injustice and chaos are logical consequences of living in Wonderland.
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Rackin, Donald. "Alice's Journey to the End of Night." Modern Language Association. 81.5 (1966): 313-326. Print
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