better known as Lewis Carroll. Educated at Christ Church, Oxford, Carroll spent his entire career there as a mathematician. He wrote upon the theory of voting and various mathematical and logical issues, as well as filling Alice in Wonderland (1865), Alice through the Looking Glass (1871), and The Hunting of the Snark (1876) with play upon logical, philosophical, and semantic themes. Humpty Dumpty exhibits a form of the Euthyphro dilemma in his views on his authority over his words; the White Knight delves deep into the problem of names, the White King takes nobody to be a person; the Snark is a topic-neutral object of a quest (sometimes identified with the Absolute), and throughout the humour depends upon pushing logical and philosophical reasoning to absurdity. Carroll’s paper ‘What the Tortoise said to Achilles’ (Mind, 1895) presents the classic statement of the need for rules of inference as well as axioms in formal systems.

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Dodgson.html A biography of Dodgson, including his contributions to mathematics and logic

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/carroll/index.html A list of internet resources on Dodgson