Abstract

In a letter to Bertrand Russell, dated 17 May 1905, Hugh MacColl tells how he abandoned the study of logic after 1884 for about thirteen years and how it was the reading of Lewis Carroll’s Symbolic Logic (1896) that ”rekindled the old fire which [he] thought extinct.” From then onwards, he published several papers containing some of his major logical innovations. The aim of this paper is to discuss MacColl’s acquaintance with and appreciation of Carroll’s work, and how that reading convinced him to come back into the realm of logic. There is no evidence that the two men ever met or exchanged any personal correspondence. However, MacColl reviewed in The Athenaeum several of Carroll’s books, mainly on geometry and logic. Often, Carroll replied to MacColl’s criticisms in the following editions of his works. A discussion of these sources provides interesting insights to MacColl’s (and Carroll’s) mathematical and logical investigations.