Technically, yesterday, January 30, CGTC 5 hadn't started yet. This year we were co-located with Recreational Math, which happened right beforehand, and there was a sort of bridge event last night in the form of a talk by Robin Wilson: "Lewis Carroll in Numberland", so I'm counting that as this year's day zero.
Dr. Wilson talked about Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), who was a Math lecturer at Oxford, Christ Church, from 1856 to 1881, including his use of fanciful mathematics in his children's fiction. As a child, Charles made mazes for his ten siblings (he was third oldest of eleven children). He studied at Oxford 1851-1854, where he got top marks on his exams. he did a lot of artful photography, at an early age for the field.
In his career, he taught from Euclid's Elements and wrote the text "Euclid and His Modern Rivals," a fictional book where Euclid is compared to current mathematicians. He also had an interest in voting theory and did some examples about problems with First-Past-the-Post. He also did a lot of examples with proportional voting scenarios. He was interested in tournament brackets and described alternatives. He also wrote a book about mathematical puzzles, including the Monkey Puzzle.
In further interest to us CGT types, he created a logical game which was used to make symbolic logic derivations using a board and counters.
This was a great way to get my appetite ready for all the talks we had in store!
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