Snark musings - 2
In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away -
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.
[Ed: this is me talking to Ben...] You wrote a paper on
Snarks, Ben, as part of your Maths degree, of which you were
inordinately proud ... you will remember that you had been very
taken by the Annotated Hunting of the Snark that sat next to the
annotated Alice (both by Martin Gardner) on my bookshelf all of
your life (until they both mysteriously disappeared ... they
possibly softly and sudddenly vanished away ... or they could have
found their way onto your bookshelf ...) and it seems that the use
of the term in maths was initiated by the same Martin Gardner (Dr
Ben will correct my understanding if I have got that
wrong!!). You did also tell me how happy you were with the
layout of the text: using mathematical symbols smoothly, and also
fitting diagrams in with the text.
Your paper seems to me to have held firmly
to the maths (in a way that I could not possibly have done - I
would have had to shoe-horn in something about Boojums some how!)
with only a brief footnote mentioning Gardner's book. In the
absence of that original, well thumbed (and actually falling
apart) paperback version of the annotated snark, I have purchased
a most superior hard-backed 'Definitive Edition' in order to
pursue (as did the crew in the tale) the meaning of, or the
significance of, a Boojum.
Well, there are a number of possible meanings (of course!
Because it is all nonsense really..!) however the one that I like
best was actually something named after Carrol's Boojum: the
Boojum tree in, yes you guessed it, Mexico! You probably
wouldn't have seen one as they grow in the desert on that
peninsular of Mexico that descends from California in the North
West, and is in fact called Baja California:
However, the tree looks to me like rather like some of the plants
you were drawing in Mexico...
ĦQue haya luz! Kerenza ha yeghes
da! Dad/Andrew x