to Marianne M.

This is Texinfo edition 2.1 of `alice.texi' as of November 1, 1994.
This document was initially created by Jörg Heitkötter on December 30, 1993.

The Texinfo edition originated from Michael Hawley's plain ASCII text files,
available from `world.std.com', in the Open Book Initiative's (OBI) Gopher Hole.


Copyright © 1865, 1872 by Lewis Carroll (expired)
ASCII edition, Copyright © 1992 by Michael Hawley
Texinfo edition, Copyright © 1994 by Jörg Heitkötter

Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this booklet under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this booklet into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved by the Texinfo editor.

Preface to the Texinfo Edition

Welcome to the second Texinfo edition of "Alice in Wonderland". This project started some time ago, during a trip to Edinburgh, Scotland. Back in 1993, I found myself strolling through a shopping mall at Weaverley Station, where I came across a big (and cheap) volume entitled ``The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll'', published by Chancellor Press, London, UK. (ISBN-0-907486-215)

I couldn't resist the temptation to read the original, before, I had only read German translations of Lewis' writings, and the final consequences of this shopping experience, is now at your fingertips, when you read these lines online, hooked into cyberspace.

However, this is not the first electronically readable version, instead I could build upon former work carried out by Michael Hawley.(1) His OCR scanned ASCII version of the two volumes contained in this edition, is available for everybody connected to the global communications network, the so-called "Internet," for brevity most often referred to as "The Net."

It seems that there are several versions of Alice's Adventures around, that are slightly different in typography and print, and even some sentences seem to be altered, with respect to the language used. The above mentioned book, thus served as the definite reference, whenever questions arose, while converting Michael's version to Texinfo format.

Biographical Notes

Lewis Carroll, alias Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was born in 1832 in Daresbury, a village in Cheshire, NW England, a few miles SW of the town of Warrington.

He was not a full professor of mathematics and logic at Oxford University, as the rumor goes. Instead, he was (until he resigned) a "Fellow" (part of the faculty that teaches undergrads(2)) at Christ Church (a college of Oxford University). Like his father, who was the parson of Daresbury, he was a clergyman. The church now contains a stained-glass window depicting the White Rabbit (and possibly other Wonderland characters?).

Carroll published many pieces on Euklidian and Non-Euklidian geometry, and computation of determinants. The classical story is that Queen Victoria was so enchanted by the first Alice book that she asked him to dedicate his next one to her. He obliged by dedicating An Elementary Treatise on Determinants to her; once again, Q-V- was "not amused". (So this guy really had a good portion of British humor.)

But generally, his mathematical work is not regarded as of being of any significance. However, with Pillow Problems a column for a periodical he edited, which can be thought of a pre-cursor of the Mathematical Recreations (and Computer Recreations) column in todays "Scientific American," he contributed much to the popularization of mathematics, rather than mathematical research. But even this is a very hard to accomplish task of it's very own right. (As all those teaching mathematics, or logic will know...)

Only recently, in a 1993 issue of The History of Mathematics, Francine F. Abeles of the Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science at Kean College of New Jersey, published a paper entitled Charles L. Dodgson's Geometric Approach to Arctangent Relations for Pi.(3) The abstract reads:

Approximating pi and attempting to square the circle have a long and interesting history. In 1875, C.L. Dodgson began work on a computationally simple approximation method for would-be circle squarers that would convince them of the futility of their attempts. Relating the earlier geometric and newer analytic approaches in a practical way, this method produces an accurate approximation for pi efficiently.

His two pieces, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", first published in 1865 and "Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice found there", first published in 1872, have become well-known parts of the history of literature.

Lewis Carroll died 1898 in Guildford, England.

References

Francine F. Abeles, Charles L. Dodgson's Geometric Approach to Arctangent Relations for Pi, Journal of the History of Mathematics, pp151-159, Academic Press, 1993. (0315-0860/93)

A more complete biography can be found in: Lewis Carroll: An illustrated biography by Derek Hudson. New American Library/A Meridian book, 1977.

The Gutenberg version also contains an extremely readworthy version called The annotated Alice by Martin Garner.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the following individuals who helped in de-mystifying some of the background of Lewis Carroll's biography. In the order I received their contributions, thanks to: Torkel Franzen, Robert Hill, IGOR, William H. Rowan, Shimpei Yamashita, Alec McKenzie, D.P. Laurie, Richard R. Carlton, Phil Gibbs, Lionel Cons, Herman Rubin, Peter Lamb, David J. Snook, N. Shirlene Pearson, Dave Joyce, Brian Stewart, and B. Markus Jakobsson. Iain A.F. Fleming, later clarified two more quirks in the initial release of the 2nd edition.

Thanks to Rainer Klute for a fast Hey Rainer, I need a scanner... job (on a rainy saturday afternoon at UniDO), that gave me the first pictures.

Reports on this half-finished version have been broadcast on German TV (Aspekte on ARD, Neues on 3Sat, etc.), in special features during the 1994 Frankfurt book fair. Jens Jansen provided all other images scanned at 400 DPI, so there shall be a print-it-yourself kit including the pictures real soon now.

I'd like to dedicate this edition to Marianne Mueller---she knows why.

Enjoy!

Jörg Heitkötter
<joke@Germany.EU.net>
EUnet Deutschland GmbH
Research & Development
November 1, 1994