![]() Without Carroll's secret ingredient, Alice might never have achieved her fame. ![]() "Last year, in fact, a scholar in Oxford called Melanie Bayley wrote a complete dissertation analyzing Alice In Wonderland, and she identified a number of mathematical allusions in the story." "We knew that Carroll was actually a mathematician," Devlin says. The hidden math in Alice may come as a surprise to many, but mathematicians have always known Carroll was slipping some numbers into his fiction. "In fact, when the Hatter and the Hare try to squeeze the Dormouse into the teapot, they're trying to somehow get away from this complexity - throw away another of the parameters, if you like - so that life can resume as normal."ĭevlin says Carroll's message is that we "get rid of all of this complexity in the first place, and let's just go back to the familiar old geometry that we've had since Euclid for 2,000 years." "It was just like the characters rotating round and round the tea party, round and round the table." ![]() "What Hamilton said was if you take this time parameter out of these new numbers, then the numbers would just keep rotating around - they won't go anywhere," Devlin says. (You can read the chapter here if your memory needs refreshing.) But the blend of fidelity and revisionism ensures Miller’s intellectually affectionate adaptation fully merits the epithet ‘curiouser and curiouser’.Yet it's the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse at the tea party - the character Time is absent. Squarely aimed at grown-ups, this was commissioned by the BBC as a centenary celebration. ![]() Yet Ann-Marie Mallik’s Alice is anything but a waif, as she gives as good as she gets during a progress whose trance-like oddity is reinforced by Dick Bush’s deep-focus monochrome photography and Ravi Shankar’s sitar score. ![]() He also invested the action with a somnambulant melancholy that made adulthood seem forbidding. Stripping away the masks and costumes, he allowed the audience to see Wilfrid Brambell’s White Rabbit, Peter Cook’s Hatter, Peter Sellers’s King of Hearts and John Gielgud’s Turtle. Despising the Disney take, Jonathan Miller set out to de-anthropomorphise the story by returning to Dodgson’s mathematical logic and Victorian values. ![]()
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