Originally published at: Flatland is one of my favorite Math(ish) books | Boing Boing
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Flatland is really the start of a new genre, math fiction. Except that unlike science fiction, aside from a couple sequels people have written and Planiverse I think it is still empty.
I should really see how the movie turned out some time.
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I highly recommend the annotated version,
https://www.maa.org/press/maa-reviews/flatland-an-edition-with-notes-and-commentary
The notes treat various topics. Some explain the mathematics appearing in the text. Some provide historical background, usually concerning either Victorian England or classical Greece. The authors view Abbott as having “devised an extended geometric metaphor by projecting late-Victorian England onto a two-dimensional space with a ‘civilization’ in various ways similar to that of classical Greece. Further, he heightened his satirical commentary on the present by making prominent in this imaginary civilization the very aspects of classical Greece that its Victorian apologists had rationalized away — for example, slavery, a rigid class system, misogyny, and ancient forms of social Darwinism.” These targets of Abbott’s satire receive considerable coverage in the commentary.
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I have a different annotated version, by Ian Stewart:
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A spectacular piece of, let’s say, geometric fiction. I remember finding it in my high school library many years ago and being delighted at the way it made you see the world in new ways.
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I love Flatland. It really is multi-dimensional.
I also enjoyed and recommend Flatterland
and Spaceland.
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Heh, I recently re-read Bradbury’s I Sing the Body Electric, one story in which involves a baby being born into another dimension, who appears in ours as a small blue pyramid.
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Not there to correct anyone’s math, this rather jagged Flatland creature appeared in The Outer Limits episode “Behold Eck!”.
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That looks like fun!
Which one? There’s 2007’s Flatland, and then there’s 2007’s Flatland: The Movie. 2007 was a big year for Flatland! (I kid, I see you posted the trailer for the latter. Which apparently had a sequel in 2012?)
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That’s how entities from the 2nd Dimension would work, right?
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I enjoyed “Dragon’s Egg” for these reasons. More for the physics, because of the setting, and similarity in experiencing the universe from a very different physical perspective. Robert Forward wrote some keen stuff back in the day…
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Came to make this reference; happily usurped.
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“Flatland: The Film” is on YouTube in toto
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https://www.rudyrucker.com/thefourthdimension/thefourthdimension_800.jpg
This great Rudy Rucker book is a very readable, fun (and mind -blowing to undergrad me in the early 00s) extension of Flatland to prompt consideration of physical dimensions beyond the first three. It’s the book that introduced me to Flatland.
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Eventually, he comes to understand that there are worlds of not only three dimensions but of four and beyond.
Five. Five is not “right out”, five is where it’s at.
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I used to subscribe to Discover magazine as a kid, and they had a really great mental exercise like Flatland in it to help visualize higher dimensions. It started with imagining a square passing through a 1 dimensional world, corner first so that it appeared as a line expanding and then contracting. Then how a cube would look passing through a 2 dimensional world, a rough quadrangle expanding and then contracting. Then it lulled you into imagining that the change you see over time is a 4th dimensional shape moving through our perceptible planes. I still like to imagine myself as a long 4th-dimensional sausage where one end looks like a baby, and the other end looks like an old man with all the states of movement in between like a stack of animation cells.
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This was mine:
I think I had seen How Real Is Real? mentioned/for sale in a Loompanics catalog, then lucky for me, soon after that some remaindered copies turned up at the university bookstore.
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