Lewis Carroll
1832–1898 · England
a mathematics don who let the logic go pleasantly mad
Charles Dodgson lectured in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford, for twenty-six years, published on determinants and symbolic logic, took deacon's orders and never proceeded to the priesthood, stammered, and was a serious early photographer at a time when a single portrait meant coating, exposing and developing a glass plate in minutes.
On an afternoon in July 1862 he rowed up the Isis with a colleague and three young sisters, and told a story to keep them entertained. One of them, Alice Liddell, asked him to write it down. He did — by hand, with his own drawings — and gave it to her as a Christmas present. Published in 1865 with Tenniel's illustrations, it did something no children's book had done before: it declined to teach a lesson.
He guarded the separation between his two names, returning letters addressed to Lewis Carroll at his college. His photographs of children, and his friendship with the Liddells, have been argued over for a century; the record is genuinely incomplete, since pages were later cut from his diaries by his family, and much of what is asserted confidently in either direction is not supported by what actually survives.