BELIEVE IT OR NOT

The White Queen once told Alice she can believe “at least six impossible things before breakfast.” But these are true:

1 Lewis Carroll is the pen name of Oxford University mathematics don Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-98).

2 He wrote two Alice books — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871).

3 Wonderland began as a story for Alice and her sisters, children of his boss Henry Liddell, the Dean of Oxford, while rowing for a picnic.

4 A 1933 film combines the Alice books, with a cast including Cary Grant as the Mock Turtle, W.C. Fields as Humpty-Dumpty and Gary Cooper as the White Knight.

5 Several Wonderland characters come from a deck of cards. In Looking Glass, several are chess pieces.

6 Queen Victoria liked the first Alice book so much that she commanded Dodgson dedicate his next book to her. So he did: An Elementary Treatise on Determinants.