![]() He glimpses a world that few Flatlanders have seen before, but those who have are not to be trifled with and his enlightenment ultimately proves to be his undoing. After much debate and many analogies, the sphere finally manages to convince Mr Square. Is reminded of a dream in which he visited Lineland and vainly tried to convince its inhabitants of the existence of a second dimension. One day, the Square meets an alien: a being claiming to be a three-dimensional sphere from Spaceland! While most Flatlanders would flatly reject such an outrageous idea, Mr Square In this well-ordered world lives the narrator, A Square, a professional gentleman and proud father of four pentagonal sons (for male children have a good chance of being born with one more side than their fathers). ![]() No-one in Flatland has any notion of a third dimension everything is "Infinitely-sided" circles form the highest cast consisting of priests, and straight lines the lowest, consisting of - who else? - women. In Flatland, the more sides you've got, the higher up the social scale you are. It still is one of the best introductions to a mathematical world of higher dimensions, and it's an amazingly imaginative social satire, too.įlatland is set in a flat land: the two-dimensional plane inhabited by straight lines, polygons and circles. ![]() ![]() Abbott wrote this beautiful tale over a hundred years ago under the pseudonym A Square. Flatland: a romance of many dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott ![]()
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