World of Scientific Discovery on Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
Charles Dodgson was the oldest of eleven children in a parish priest 's family. Every member of the Dodgson family stammered including Charles, who was also intensely shy, but these impediments did not hinder him from developing a talent for mathematics. Charles was enrolled at Christ Church, Oxford in 1850 and received his bachelor 's degree in 1854 after studying mathematics and classics. He taught mathematics and was ordained a deacon in the Church of England although he never became a priest.
Dodgson was uncomfortable in the company of adults, and he never married. His complex and, in the view of some modern scholars, controversial friendships with the children of his many friends inspired Dodgson to write under the nom de plume he had used previously as a writer of verse-- Lewis Carroll. The books he wrote for one girl, Alice Liddell, were Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, which became classics of children's literature. Dodgson's fascination with problems of logic and puzzles formed the core of these books and was a feature of many of his popular writings on games and "the lower mathematics, " as he put it.
The nineteenth century saw an explosion of interest on the part of the general public in games of logic and mathematical puzzles, and Dodgson played a prominent role in fueling their popularity. Dodgson used puzzles as teaching aids and developed their potential as such in books including Pillow Problems, A Tangled Tale, and The Game of Logic. His writings show an understanding of the theory of sets, which was being developed by Dodgson's contemporary Georg Cantor. In fact, Dodgson helped introduce the concept of the universal set to the Venn diagram of sets. Dodgson, however, did not follow the progress of modern mathematics as it was being formulated in his day, though he wrote a number of sophisticated papers on mathematical topics. One of Dodgson 's favorite subjects was Euclidean geometry, on which he wrote numerous pamphlets, textbooks and an intriguing five-act comedy called Euclid and His Modern Rivals. Dodgson 's inattention to the mathematics of his day is revealed in his " discovery" of the unsatisfactoriness of Euclid's fifth postulate concerning parallel lines. The flaw in Euclid's reasoning would have been less a surprise to Dodgson had he been aware of the work of Georg Riemann and others who had already formulated the techniques of non-Euclidean geometry.
Dodgson is not considered to have been a major contributor to mathematics, but he still commands respect as an imaginative communicator of mathematical concepts to the general public. His literary works alone are sufficient to secure his place in history as one of the most creative intellects of modern times.
Recent Updates
August 9, 2004: An unpublished notebook of Dodgson's photos, newspaper clippings, and annotations was posted to the Internet at the Global Gateway web site. Source: Global Gateway, http://international.loc.gov/intld/carrollhtml, August 9, 2004.
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