I’m very happy to be able to reprise my talk about the Curious Maths of Alice in Wonderland at Imagine Books on Saturday, December 15th at 1pm.

Here’s the abstract:

“Whatever good meanings are in the book, I’m glad to accept as the meaning of the book.” - Lewis Carroll
Literary scholars* have spent the last 150 years trying to unravel the meaning behind Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice in Wonderland. Some think it’s about sex. Some think it’s about drugs. Rock and roll, sad to say, hadn’t been invented yet. However, there’s another, more interesting interpretation: is Alice in Wonderland really a satire about the new style of maths that was coming to the fore in the mid-19th Century?
In this talk - fully accessible to non-mathematicians - I explain what pigs have to do with doughnuts, why the Mad Hatter is important for computer graphics, and whether a raven is topologically equivalent to a writing desk.
* not all of them, obviously

This talk sold out in Wimborne last month, so I’d recommend arriving early as Imagine is an even smaller venue. It’s a proper bookshop that smells of books and everything.

Look forward to seeing you there!