Math and Photography

An Elementary Treatise on Determinants: With Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraical Geometry.

By Charles Dodgson.

London: Macmillan and Co., 1867.

This is one of Lewis Carroll’s technical mathematical works published under his given name. “Determinants,” according to the Lewis Carroll Handbook, “belong to higher mathematics, and are the sums of the products (of a particular kind) of a square block of quantities.”

Professor Francine Abeles has written “that many of the ideas involving inversions and mirror images that are so prevalent in the Alice books found their way into Dodgson’s more serious work as well,” referring to Alice’s shrinking, which is something like the shrinkage—or condensation—of a set of numbers to a single number.

Exhibit item 6.6