After Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland became the next big thing in late 1865, the Queen of England herself demanded that Lewis Carroll send her his next work posthaste. Merry Christmas, Royal Highness: Carroll presented her with one of his mathematical treatises, a real page-turner.
It turns out this story is just a myth; even Carroll himself vociferously denied it. As he wrote in the postscript to the second edition of his book Symbolic Logic, “It is utterly false in every particular: nothing even resembling it has occurred.” His frustration probably stemmed from the rumor’s conflation of his dual identities—children’s author Lewis Carroll and math scholar Charles Dodgson. Carroll, best known for his Wonderland books, was a man of nonsense and letters. Dodgson, a math teacher, was a man of logic and numbers. (His “Lewis Carroll” pen name was derived from Latinizing, re-Anglicizing, and transposing his given name, Charles Lutwidge.) The personae had one thing in common, though: educating and entertaining children.* The end product of these ventures was puzzles.
To convey dry classroom math concepts to students in a palatable manner, Dodgson invented countless games, brainteasers, and logic problems aimed to edify, amuse, and delight his young audience. In fact, he created entire books of math and logic puzzles:, , , and were all published under the Carroll name to boost sales, despite Dodgson’s desire not to cross-contaminate his identities. The first of these outlined a board game Carroll designed to represent the components of logic problems. This book was often compiled with the one that followed () which focused on syllogisms, or, in Carroll’s case, nonsensical “sillygisms.” These present a series of true premises from which a conclusion must be drawn. Here’s one to test your deduction skills:
