A Tangled Tale

Balbus, Mad Mathesis, and Her Radiancy deserve to be rescued from Oblivion. The Ten Knots that form this Tangled Tale by Lewis Carrol show him as Teacher, Mathematician, and Story-Teller. To unravel the Knots, to solve the Problems that they conceal will tax the ingenuity and imagination of the Reader enabling him (or her) to escape for a time, like Alice, into a world of Phantastic Logic where rules are inexorably obeyed.

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This tale originally appeared as a serial in the Monthly Packet, beginning in April, 1880. The writer's intention was to embody in each Knot (like the medicine so dexterously, but ineffectually, concealed in the jam of our early childhood) one or more mathematical questions - in Arithmetic, Algebra, or Geometry, as the case might be - for the amusement, and possible edification, of the fair readers of that Magazine.

(from the preface of the original edition of the book, by Lewis Carrol)

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832 – 1898), better known by his pen name, as “Lewis Carroll”, was an English writer, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonder-land and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the Snark" and "Jabberwocky", all examples of the genre of literary nonsense.