The success of the "Alice" books established Charles L. Dodgson's reputation as a gifted writer of children's literature. His admirers expected humor in everything he wrote from then on, an attitude that affected the reception of his serious pieces and prevented his work from contributing to the development of their subjects. For example, the more amusing Euclid and His Modern Rivals (1879) overshadowed his more important book, Curiosa Mathematica. Part 1. A New Theory of Parallels (1888).

Dodgson made significant contributions to linear algebra in An Elementary Treatise on Determinants (1867), a book that though marred by odd notation and unusual terminology, contains the first written proof of a standard theorem connecting the rank of a matrix with the existence of solutions to certain linear systems (chapter 4, proposition II). One of his techniques, condensation, was used in an early step of the solution to the alternating sign matrix...