It’s Alice in numberland!
QUESTION
Why did the number 42 feature so prominently in Lewis Carroll’s works? Did this inspire Douglas Adams to conclude it was the ‘answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything’?
Charles lutwidge Dodgson is better known by his pseudonym lewis Carroll, author of alice’s adventures In Wonderland and Through The looking Glass.
What is less well known is that he wrote treatises in mathematics and logic under his real name. he was a ‘conservative’ mathematician who considered the Greek textbook euclid’s elements as the epitome of thinking.
Numbers and number theory abound in his works and 42 has a particular prominence. examples include the seventh stanza of Fit (an archaic term for a section of a poem revived by Carroll) The First of The hunting Of The snark:
He had forty-two boxes, all
carefully packed, With his name printed clearly on each: But, since he omitted to mention
the fact, They were all left behind on the beach.
The original edition of alice’s adventures In Wonderland contained 42 pictures. Chapter XII, alice’s evidence, contains the line: ‘rule Forty-two . . . all persons more than a mile high to leave the court.’
The number 42 would appeal to an euclidean mathematician.
It is the product (multiplied together) of two consecutive integers, 6 and 7, which makes it a pronic number. It’s also a sphenic number: the product of three distinct prime numbers, 2, 3 and 7. and it’s an abundant number: the sum of its proper divisors (1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 14 and 21) is greater than the number itself.
Douglas adams claimed he chose the number at random for The hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy: ‘It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base 13, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought: “42 will do.” I typed it out. end of story.’
however, adams was precise in his language and use of numbers. The fact he used the word Fits for the episodes of the radio series suggests he may have been influenced by Carroll.
another theory is that 42 was the missing solution to a maths problem set in 1954 at the University of Cambridge.
It was the last remaining number below 100 that could not be expressed as the sum of three cubes.
This conundrum was only solved this year with the help of a supercomputer.
Elliott Smith, Leeds.
QUESTION
What are the largest schools in Britain and the world?
CITy Montessori school in lucknow, northern India, is recognised by Guinness World records as the world’s largest school.
It has 56,000 pre-primary, primary and secondary students and 2,500 teachers across 20 campuses. The lower sixth building alone has 18,000 students.
Nottingham academy, which was formally opened in 2011, is the largest school in europe, with 3,780 pupils aged three to 19.
It has 20 classes in each year group, more than 220 teachers and 100 administrative staff.
Bella Corey, Colchester, Essex.