It is said that Queen Victoria of England had a child hidden in her that made her fond of Lewis Carroll after she read his Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Some days later, a royal messenger stopped at the house of Lewis Carroll. "Mr Carroll Sir, the Queen wants to read all your works, now," he said. Lewis Carroll was overjoyed at receiving such royal patronage and promptly produced copies of all his works for the Queen.

"What are these?" the Queen said after she had read some of the papers. "All his works Your Majesty," said the messenger. "These are not his works, these are some puzzling arcs and symbols," said the Queen. "That’s right Your Majesty, Mr Carroll is a mathematician," said the messenger, "Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is only one of his rare works of fiction."

Carroll’s books of fiction are actually brilliantly disguised works of mathematics. Somewhere in the book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Caroll has written: "The different branches of Arithmetic — Ambition, Distraction, Uglifi-cation, and Derision." At another point in Through the Looking Glass, he has written: "Can you do addition?" the White Queen asked. "What’s one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one and one?" "I don’t know," said Alice. "I lost count."

If you have read Alice in Wonderland, have you come across these lines while reading it: "Alice laughed: "There’s no use trying," she said; "one can’t believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven’t had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Then, consider these lines in Through the Looking Glass: "It's very good jam," said the Queen. "Well, I don't want any to-day, at any rate." "You couldn't have it if you did want it," the Queen said. "The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday but never jam to-day." "It must come sometimes to jam to-day,"Alice objected. "No it can’t," said the Queen. "It’s jam every other day; to-day isn’t any other day, you know." "I don’t understand you," said Alice. "It’s dreadfully confusing." Even when he wore his literary hat, Carroll’s mind remained that of a mathematician.

Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, who lived from 1799 to 1837, is called the national poet of Russia. In his work Likhtenshtein, you will find these words: Inspiration is needed in geometry, just as much as in poetry.

Should we then imagine that a mathematician is not a mathematician unless he is some kind of a poet as well or vice versa. Literary minds have borrowed a lot from mathematicians and in most cases, these two were one.

The Mirror Crack’d by Agatha Christie was written in 1962. A careful reader would know upon reading it that the author is a mathematical genius. Consider these lines penned by the ‘Mistress of Murder’: "I think you're begging the question," said Haydock, "and I can see looming ahead one of those terrible exercises in probability where six men have white hats and six men have black hats and you have to work it out by mathematics how likely it is that the hats will get mixed up and in what proportion. If you start thinking about things like that, you would go round the bend. Let me assure you of that!"

In her autobiography, Agatha writes, "I continued to do arithmetic with my father, passing proudly through fractions to decimals. I eventually arrived at the point where so many cows ate so much grass, and tanks filled with water in so many hours. I found it quite enthralling."

Winston Churchill, who was a walking book of quotations, once said, "I had a feeling once about mathematics — that I saw it all. Depth beyond depth was revealed to me — the Byss and Abyss. I saw — as one might see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor’s Show — a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly why it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable, but it was after dinner and I let it go." A mathematician is a mathematician, even in laziness.

William Shakespeare was not untouched by mathematics and its charms. Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t — are famous words in Hamlet. "O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." "I am ill at these numbers," are the words of Hamlet.

Einstein once met some school students who said they found mathematics a difficult subject. Einstein told them, "Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics, I assure you that mine are greater." He was serious.

All of us have read poems of Alexander Pope in school. He also wrote an Epitaph on Newton: Nature and Nature’s law lay hid in night: God said, "Let Newton be!," and all was light. Sir John Collings Squire added the following lines to it: It did not last: the Devil shouting "Ho. Let Einstein be," restored the status quo.

Far From the Madding Crowd is a beautiful work of Thomas Hardy and it has these lines in it: ...he seemed to approach the grave as an hyperbolic curve approaches a lineless directly as he got nearer, till it was doubtful if he would ever reach it at all.

Far more mathematicians than artists go mad. This is because the difficulty lies in logic, not in imagination.

— Aditya Rishi