 The first description of the problem in close to its modern wording appeared in the diaries of the mathematician and author Lewis Carroll ("Alice in Wonderland") in 1888, involving a pile of nuts on a table serially divided by four brothers, each time with remainder of one given to a monkey, and the final division comes out even.The problem never appeared in any of the author's published works, though from other references it appears the problem was in circulation in 1888.An almost identical problem soon appeared in W.W.