The new Alice in Wonderland, directed by Tim Burton and starring his usual buddies Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter (and Anne Hathaway, a personal fave), is causing quite a stir. Burton seems just as logical a choice to direct as Depp does to play the Madhatter. Many people still haven't figured out that it will actually be a sequel to and not a remake of the first Disney Alice.

Many people know that Lewis Carroll was a) a pen name (for a man named Charles Dodgeson) and b) a mathematician when he wasn't a vaguely pedophelic author. That Alice was written by a mathematician is a favorite fact of grade-school math textbook publishers. But anyways, today's focus is on a piece from the New York Times (again, sorry) about the relationship between the book and the history of Mathematics. Melanie Bayley, an doctoral candidate in English at Oxford, makes the case that Alice is a veiled criticism of developments in Mathematics that were taking place in his time.

You can find it here.

This is a fascinating read, although it helps to have a more than basic knowledge of mathematics. Perhaps it ties in nicely with the series the NYT is doing on explaining math.