Mad Mathematicians

For decades, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was usually interpreted with the upcoming Psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud et al.

An article written by Melanie Bayley, 2009 suggest, that the author behind the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, mathematician Charles Dodgson had problems with the modern clergy of maths and especially with the up and coming Complex Numbers:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427391-600-alices-adventures-in-algebra-wonderland-solved/

Best to start with a good line

Call me Ishmael. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)

There were four of us. Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (1889)

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. George Orwell, 1984 (1949)