Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
Born: 27 Jan 1832 in Daresbury, England
Died: 14 Jan 1898 in Guilford, England
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Charles Dodgson was a mathematics lecturer and author of mathematics books who is better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll.
Dodgson is known especially for Alice's adventures in wonderland (1865) and Through the looking glass (1872), children's books that are also distinguished as satire and as examples of verbal wit. He invented his pen name by anglicizing the translation of his first two names into the Latin 'Carolus Lodovicus'.
The son of a clergyman Dodgson, from 1846 to 1850, attended Rugby School and graduated from Christ Church College Oxford in 1854, coming first in the Finals. Dodgson remained there, lecturing on mathematics and writing treatises and guides for students until 1881. Although he took deacon's orders in 1861, Dodgson was never ordained a priest, partly because he was afflicted with a stammer that made preaching difficult and partly, perhaps, because he had discovered other interests.
Among Dodgson's hobbies was photography, at which he became proficient. He excelled especially at photographing children. Alice Liddell, one of the three daughters of Henry George Liddell, the dean of Christ Church, was one of his photographic subjects and the model for the fictional Alice.
As a mathematician, Dodgson was conservative. He was the author of a fair number of mathematics books, for instance A syllabus of plane algebraical geometry (1860). None of his mathematics books have proved of enduring importance except for Euclid and his modern rivals (1879) which is of historical interest.
As a logician, he was more interested in logic as a game than as an instrument for testing reason. He contributed in 'Jabberwocky', the word 'chortle', a word that combines 'snort' and 'chuckle', to the English language.
References elsewhere in this archive:
Tell me about Dodgson's work on Mathematical games and recreations
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