"What the fuck!" - Queen Victoria circa 1867 I quote her all the time.

It's very possible that Lewis Caroll intended his novel to be both a story for children and a satire of mathematics. Great artists are often able to combine genre that don't seem like they fit together.

"..8 came even later.." he's _so_ quick.

David's 'number nine' gag reminds me of Louis CK's story about his daughter listening to an NPR story about a protest in Washington by a group of 9/11 'truthers'. In the report they were continually referred to as "9/11 deniers". Louis's daughter was confused by this. She thought that it was a protest by nine people who refused to accept the existence of the number 11.

9 was invented and for some reason the Germans said, 'No!'

Numberwang

There's a lot of actually very logical thinking in Alice and Wonderland. The Mad Hatter's watch only shows what day it is because he knows damn well that it's teatime.

"The cat was brilliantly played in the Tim Burton version by...who did the voice of the cat?" Oh God, I just about died when I heard that.

Broke down at "They needed it for the war"

*"Minus 2000 points."* 😂

I'm not sure I have ever heard Stephen say fuck before? I love it!

Wait, what? He played the Cheshire cat in Tim Burton's "Alice"? I ddin't know that. Didn't even recognize his voice.

"dubious theory" is just an old posh way to say "hot take".

Ah yes J for jubious

I think the foray into complex analysis and non euclidean geometry came as quie a bit of a shock to quite a few classicists.

But this isn't true at all, Carroll's other works are not all "boring maths", he also wrote Sylvie and Bruno, and The Hunting of the Snark, A Tangled Tale, and a huge amount of nonsense verse and humorous verse.. Even if he doesn't write the show, I'd be quite surprised if Stephen Fry didn't know this! And yet he reads it out..

Sarah or Alan are so warm and funny. They are my ideal partners for growing old.

I always wondered if these dubious topic websites are created by the QI team or have been there before?

I went to alice malice dot com and was very confused. That was the ...wrong... site.

Ches was always one of my favorite characters in Alice in Wonderland. I especially loved him in the Tim Burton movie. I had no idea until this clip that was Stephen Fry doing the voice. To be fair, when I saw it, I had never heard of Stephen Fry. I love it even more now.

Who says that his other works are all dull and moralistic? His other works include the Hunting of the Snark and Sylvie and Bruno, and a quite funny series of logic problems written out as a story. Wonderland isn't unusual among his oeuvre. Also, I think they are being narrow by saying it's an attack on mathematics, it's focused on satirizing things victorian children encountered, such as rote memorization of poems that are too difficult for them to understand, as with Jabberwocky.

Queen Victoria's Bumper Book of Very Hard Sums.

3:06

The story about Queen Victoria is false, by Lewis Carroll's own statement. In fact, ironically given Stephen's suggestion for the book he's supposed to have dedicated to her, it was in a postscript to "Symbolic Logic" that he denied it: "I take this opportunity of giving what publicity I can to my contradiction of a silly story, which has been going the round of the papers, about my having presented certain books to Her Majesty the Queen. It is so constantly repeated, and is such absolute fiction, that I think it worth while to state, once for all, that it is utterly false in every particular: nothing even resembling it has occurred."

If he disliked abstraction in maths so much, he'd have a field day with modern economics lol Many people have even forgot what it is they are abstracting!

Mitchell looking “normal” and relaxed here… even rather handsome, I might add… not a particularly interesting comment on my part, but a good look for him 🤷🏼‍♂️

I didn’t know Lewis Carroll was a mathematician. The world is strange.

This was in a Cracked article a really long time ago.

For some reason, even as a child, I never liked 'Alice in Wonderland'. Also, I hated maths...This "Dubious Theory" makes COMPLETE sense to me!!!

I could not find the "Alice Schmalice" website referenced in the first minute or so.

Good Lord, the Queen Victoria bit made me burst into uncontrollable laughter

J for dubious

So, what was poor Alans final score in this episode?

There was a numberwang joke in there somewhere

that's not true that all his other books were dry. there are also the Sylvie and Bruno books, and some great verse, and fun book of narrative puzzles.

That's numberwank!

Stephen's account of the history of twentieth-century mathematics is a bit muddled. Turing's work on the theory of computation had rather more to do with Charles Dodgson's domain of expertise, symbolic logic and linear algebra, than with the developments in analysis and geometry/topology that Stephen cites. Nevertheless, it is true enough to say that Dodgson's conservatism put him at odds with the revolution in modern mathematics brought about by figures such as Dedekind, Dirichlet, Hilbert, Klein, Noether, Poincare, et al.

0:40 Air Bud 4: Literary Edition

While you make jokes about the invention of a new number there was a group called the Pythagoreans which believed in Pythagoras and that all that irrational number stuff was bollocks when someone discovered a right angled triangle of side 1 each would lead to a hypotenuse of size root 2 and he was executed for it

stephen fry

If its been on Qi and cracked.com then it must be true.

What is the website for Alice in wonderland theory?

I like how Stephen drops the F bomb and then the camera immediately cuts to the priest.

I clicked this link, when I saw Sarah Millican was in this clip, but I was a little disappointed that she didn't say anything.

while watching this i typed in 'tim' into the search and it auto completed 'tim burton cheshire cat'

One thing I noticed, because I wear them, is that Stephen's glasses are were very smudged up with this fingerprints, looking hazy. That would drive me crazy and I'm surprised he didn't clean them often in the show, or at least take more care in holding him.

Did they actually take 2000 points off Alan?

the clue is given away with the String theory ,that alice is holding

The elves should have notified Fry that Mitchell stumbled across something quite interesting with his comment about the number 9 and the possible controversy about it. 9 was, of course, invented millennia before, but was referred to simply as "the new number", which sounds negative to me.

I miss fry hosting

Dubious is in the J series already if you spell it like how Fry pronounces it.

and what mean all these mysteries to me whose life is full of indices and surds x^2+7x+53 =11/3

Wait, Carroll was a _symbolic logician,_ but he didn't approve of _abstraction?_

the video image is too poor, you need to fix it more

Nothing will be what it is and everything will be what it isn't!

Or the truth that Lewis Carol had epilepsy and it is step by step guide to one of his seazures. From him blacking out and going down the rabbit hole which represents the beginning

For a long time number 9 was accused to be number 6 in disguise.

love her laugh

First, let me say that I am grateful that when discussing Alice in Wonderland, Fry didn't cite any scenes from Through the Looking Glass. They are often intermingled, but they are two separate stories and mixing them up ruins the satire. Lewis Caroll does poke a lot of fun at mathematics, but also at social formality, organized religion, and political melodrama. He hated demagoguery and showiness, and advocated a genuine human-to-human approach to life and relationships that was more authentic and concrete than couching everything in layers of social rules and politeness, what would be today considered "PC culture." However, he didn't just write the two Alice books and then boring math books. He also wrote poetry, including the famous The Hunting of the Snark, but not all of his poetry was absurd or satirical. He wrote a series of short stories for the newspaper that contained riddles which could be solved using algebra and geometry and which were later collected into a volume called A Tangled Tale. His best work, and sadly less well known than his Alice stories, poetry, or mathematics, was a book called Sylvie and Bruno, which was originally published as two separate volumes because of the length but is really one story. If you get a chance to read Sylvie and Bruno, take it. It is very peculiar and difficult for some people to read, hence the lack of popularity, but it contains his most profound insights into human nature, society, and the essence of what is real.

Can anyone tell me the name of the vicar/priest on this episode?

Why can't it be both?

Quaternions

Was Hugh Laurie ever on QI?

Alice is so complex that mutually exclusive theories could easily be true.

I didn't know about Alice in Wonderland maybe being this, but this was my answer

Alice stories are all about alchemy

I just think he spent his spare time eating magic mushrooms...

It's not dubious, the left handed and right handed universe, mirror

It's also a chess game.

I was told it was a satire about the British political system

seven ate nine

The guy would have a nervous breakdown if he read "Categories for the Working Mathematician".

Is Stephen Fry actually good at maths?

In college, we were taught that part of Alice Through the Looking Glass was based on a chess game. www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-64-square-grid-design-of-through-the-looking-glass-24546391/

He hated negative numbers.

So both Carol & Lovecraft couldn't stand non-euclidean geometry huh

People in the comments are aguing about mathematics; meanwhile, I'm terribly bothered by the mismatched grainlines on the left and right sides of Sarah Milican's shirt. :P

Here’s the link www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427391-600-alices-adventures-in-algebra-wonderland-solved/ EXTRACT And there Dodgson’s satire of his contemporary mathematicians seems to end. What, then, would remain of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland without these analogies? Nothing but Dodgson’s original nursery tale, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, charming but short on characteristic nonsense. Dodgson was most witty when he was poking fun at something, and only then when the subject matter got him truly riled. He wrote two uproariously funny pamphlets, fashioned in the style of mathematical proofs, which ridiculed changes at the University of Oxford. In comparison, other stories he wrote besides the Alice books were dull and moralistic. I would venture that without Dodgson’s fierce satire aimed at his colleagues, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland would never have become famous, and Lewis Carroll would not be remembered as the unrivalled master of nonsense fiction.

E=mc squared don't come into the equation of stupidity does it.

So, the thumbnail shows Sarah Millican who doesn't actually speak all through this clip? Erm...

Lol hugh laurie

Was he a finitist by any chance?

Modern mathematics is a piece of absolute lunacy and craziness, but if you take into account that it works pretty well to describe the universe one realises that this statement isn't actually about maths at all but rather is left with the question if it says more about you or the universe.

Dude, what the fuck? "I don't like the new mathematics because it's not Euclidean geometry or symbolical logic." I bet he just didn't understand abstract mathematics.

I wish I could but aliceshmalice.co.uk is one of those parked websites, and alice-shmalice.co.uk is a personal website by an illustrator.

What about the theory and belief by a lot of people that AIW and ATTLG were trippy philosophical allegories of metaphysical existence?

Is nobody commenting on ‘jubious’? 😂

Euclidean geometry and symbolic logic? Was Lewis Carroll cryogenically frozen in the 14th century then thawed out in the Victorian era?

Didn´t Alice grow when she ate from a pie (PI) and shrink when she drank from a bottle (klein-flask) those might be mathmatical references too? Where Pi is the classical and the klein-bottle stands for the diminishing new field of topology? Also the mad hatter might refer to the hat matrix (projection matrix). The chessire cat always reminded me of schroedingers cat, being both there and not there.. I think there might be something to this theory...

I for one am glad that sandi toksvig took over. I know that in british society it's basically blasphemous to say that stephen fry is anything less than perfect, but idk... there's something i don't warm to with SF

What is there to dislike about modern mathematics? Matrices. Those can go to hell. SO MANY WASTED TEARS IN ALGEBRA DUE TO THOSE ACCURSED ARRAYS

Queen Victoria Bumper Book of Boring Maths.........

Uhm... I do quite hate to point it out at such a late date and after you have thoroughly embarrassed yourself already, but his name is Dodgson not Johnson as indicated by the captions. Please change captions?

I love the way Davy Mitch looks as Stevie Fry and thinks " Shit ! This geezer is cleverer than me ! " :(

So, you can have modern maths, classical maths or even abstract maths. But do they all come up wit 4 if I want to add 2 + 2?

"Jubious"?

I always thought Alice in Wonderland was the product of an opium trip involving the distortion of a his strange obsession with his niece Alice

I have a book on my shelves that claims "Alice in Wonderland" is, in fact, a confession by Lewis Carrol that he was Jack the Ripper!!! It is of course, weapons-grade b*llocks!

LOL

What theory? It's right there in the text.