Last night I was trying to solve these in my sleep and I kept waking myself up out of frustration. I had some pretty hardcore math dreams last summer too. This concept was discovered/developed in the 1940s. Losing my sanity will all be worth it when I can take a math history class.

npr:

theatlantic:

Meet the Girl Who Inspired ‘Alice in Wonderland’

‘One hundred and fifty years ago yesterday, on July 4, 1862, a young mathematician by the name of Charles Dodgson, better-known as Lewis Carroll, boarded a boat with a small group, setting out from Oxford to the nearby town of Godstow, where the group was to have tea on the river bank. The party consisted of Carroll, his friend Reverend Robinson Duckworth, and the three little sisters of Carroll’s good friend Harry Liddell—Edith (age 8), Alice (age 10), and Lorina (age 13). Entrusted with entertaining the young ladies, Dodgson fancied a story about a whimsical world full of fantastical characters, and named his protagonist Alice. So taken was Alice Liddell with the story that she asked Dodgson to write it down for her, which he did when he soon sent her a manuscript under the title of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground.

Read more. [via Brain Pickings]

— poor unliked tanya b.

Lewis Carroll: Mathematician

I want to take a math history course soooooo badly. Is Math Historian a job?