The first numbers that come to mind when thinking about Tim
Burton's Alice in Wonderland might be how much money the movie
is raking in at the box office. But numbers also appear to be
woven in among the talking rabbits and smoking caterpillars of
the original stories. Author Lewis Carroll was also a math
teacher in Oxford, England, and mathematicians say the Alice
books are full of algebraic lessons — such as why a raven is
like a writing desk. That's the riddle the Mad Hatter asks
Alice. And, as Weekend Edition Math Guy Keith Devlin tells NPR's
Jacki Lyden, "That particular scene — and lots of other scenes
in Alice in Wonderland — were a reflection on the increasing
abstraction that was going on in mathematics in the 19th
century." Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson, was a
very conservative, traditional mathematician, Devlin says, and
he didn't like the changes some were bringing to the discipline
of mathematics. "To him, algebra was all about numbers," Devlin
says. But in the 19th century, people