I'm currently taking a computer science course, and the textbook makes frequent allusions to Through the Looking glass to better demonstrate some of the ideas that Caroll throws around. One particular idea that I found interesting was the White Knight's song.
"The name of the song is called 'Haddocks' Eyes'" (186).
"The name really is 'The Aged Aged Man'" (187).
"The song is called 'Ways and Means'" (187).
"The song really is 'A-sitting On A Gate'" (187).
This is Carroll's attempt to play around with the concept of names, what something actually is, and what something is called.
These concepts are integral to computer science as they are parallel to variables, values, and formal parameters. Variables are the relationships between a value and a name, while a value is what something actually is, and a formal parameter is what a function takes in its argument. And a name is what the function or expression is labeled.
Just thought it was interesting how Carroll's ideas predated computer science by a good hundred years.
Following along the possibility that Alice's dream could be centered on Dinah; I find it interesting that, in "Alice In Wonderland," Alice had wished that Dinah could have been there, and also spoke of her to other creatures on several occasions. Then, in "Through the Looking-Glass," her dream is possibly centered around Dinah.
If the dream is centered around Dinah, what does this say about Dinah? Does it matter what it says about her?
It seems like Carroll is a popular source for analogies in many academic fields. I know that there is a theory in biology called the "Red Queen hypothesis" which is based on a line that the Red Queen says to Alice: "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place". The hypothesis refers to the co-evolution of competing species, if you're interested in it wikipedia has a pretty good summary of it at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_Hypothesis
I wonder if it is just a coincidence that Carroll's ideas are used to describe things that Carroll could not have known about in his time. Is this just due to the popularity of his works? Maybe there is just something about his writing that touches some fundamental truths. I remember Matt said something in class about paradoxes and how resolving them is how you achieve a fundamental understanding of something, and biologists have achieved a better understanding by resolving a paradox brought up by Carroll.
Carroll was a mathematician and logician in addition to his various other pursuits. Toward the end of his lifetime, a revolution in formal logic and the foundations of mathematics took place. A (somewhat reductionist) way to describe a central question of the day is that philosophers, mathematicians, and logicians were trying to figure out when a statement of mathematics made sense. Obviously, understanding to what various names refer was essential to the study.
The academic study of Programming Languages is one of the most direct descendants of this turn-of-the-last-century work. There are extremely deep connections between mathematical logic and programming languages. In fact, the Lambda Calculus, upon which the language Scheme (which I believe is what Berkeley uses in its introductory CS classes) is based, was originally conceived of as what's called a "proof system" for some forms of logic.
That being said, you might be interested to know that any program that you can write in Scheme with names can converted into a program that does the same thing but has *no* names. Not only will the program have no names, it will, in fact, have only two functions, which are named "S" and "K" (though these are names for humans, what they're called, or that they're called anything, is not important). Even more remarkable is how simple these functions are:
(define (K x y) x)
(define (S x y z) (x z (y z)))
If you find this sort of thing interesting, you might take a look at a book called "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter. A somewhat more novel approach to some of the history appears in Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" and to a much lesser extent, "Quicksilver" and "Diamond Age".
6 comments:
ummm...Dinah, the cat?
I think It's Alice's dream centered on Dinah, especially because of all the references to fishes.
I'm currently taking a computer science course, and the textbook makes frequent allusions to Through the Looking glass to better demonstrate some of the ideas that Caroll throws around. One particular idea that I found interesting was the White Knight's song.
"The name of the song is called 'Haddocks' Eyes'" (186).
"The name really is 'The Aged Aged Man'" (187).
"The song is called 'Ways and Means'" (187).
"The song really is 'A-sitting On A Gate'" (187).
This is Carroll's attempt to play around with the concept of names, what something actually is, and what something is called.
These concepts are integral to computer science as they are parallel to variables, values, and formal parameters. Variables are the relationships between a value and a name, while a value is what something actually is, and a formal parameter is what a function takes in its argument. And a name is what the function or expression is labeled.
Just thought it was interesting how Carroll's ideas predated computer science by a good hundred years.
Following along the possibility that Alice's dream could be centered on Dinah; I find it interesting that, in "Alice In Wonderland," Alice had wished that Dinah could have been there, and also spoke of her to other creatures on several occasions. Then, in "Through the Looking-Glass," her dream is possibly centered around Dinah.
If the dream is centered around Dinah, what does this say about Dinah?
Does it matter what it says about her?
It seems like Carroll is a popular source for analogies in many academic fields. I know that there is a theory in biology called the "Red Queen hypothesis" which is based on a line that the Red Queen says to Alice: "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place". The hypothesis refers to the co-evolution of competing species, if you're interested in it wikipedia has a pretty good summary of it at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_Hypothesis
I wonder if it is just a coincidence that Carroll's ideas are used to describe things that Carroll could not have known about in his time. Is this just due to the popularity of his works? Maybe there is just something about his writing that touches some fundamental truths. I remember Matt said something in class about paradoxes and how resolving them is how you achieve a fundamental understanding of something, and biologists have achieved a better understanding by resolving a paradox brought up by Carroll.
louis:
Carroll was a mathematician and logician in addition to his various other pursuits. Toward the end of his lifetime, a revolution in formal logic and the foundations of mathematics took place. A (somewhat reductionist) way to describe a central question of the day is that philosophers, mathematicians, and logicians were trying to figure out when a statement of mathematics made sense. Obviously, understanding to what various names refer was essential to the study.
The academic study of Programming Languages is one of the most direct descendants of this turn-of-the-last-century work. There are extremely deep connections between mathematical logic and programming languages. In fact, the Lambda Calculus, upon which the language Scheme (which I believe is what Berkeley uses in its introductory CS classes) is based, was originally conceived of as what's called a "proof system" for some forms of logic.
That being said, you might be interested to know that any program that you can write in Scheme with names can converted into a program that does the same thing but has *no* names. Not only will the program have no names, it will, in fact, have only two functions, which are named "S" and "K" (though these are names for humans, what they're called, or that they're called anything, is not important). Even more remarkable is how simple these functions are:
(define (K x y) x)
(define (S x y z) (x z (y z)))
If you find this sort of thing interesting, you might take a look at a book called "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter. A somewhat more novel approach to some of the history appears in Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" and to a much lesser extent, "Quicksilver" and "Diamond Age".
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