Flatland

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

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Since it is available online free from Gutenberg, I suggest everyone to give it a try. View all 10 comments. Oct 08, Mark rated it did not like it Shelves: The premise of Flatland is just that - a two dimensional flatland. As described early in the book, place a coin on a bench and look at the side from a distance. The coin will appear as just a line as does the view of everything in Flatland. Written in the late 's by a school head master and maths and science teacher, this book feels more of a vessel for him to prove his superior intelligence through the grasp of these geometric concepts than an actual entertaining read.

The book is narrated to The premise of Flatland is just that - a two dimensional flatland. The book is narrated to us by a Flatland native who is actually a two dimensional square. As with everything else he appears to others purely as a line but he is not the lowest form. The hierarchy system is based on the number of sides one has. Being a square his four sides rank him lowly but far from the bottom dwellers. Don't shoot me I am only the reviewer but the lowest figures are women.

They are purely just a line but their mouth and eye appear on their point making them extremely dangerous. When they approach you they can accidentally stab you with the point and kill you. The tradesmen are the next level up as isosceles triangles. Then come the other triangles and then up one step at a time for each extra side - meaning our narrator is a step above all triangles. He in fact is a lawyer. When you get a figure that has three or four hundred sides, the individual sides are so small and the angles almost smooth that he becomes a circle.

This is Flatland's top rank and he is a Priest. The offspring of the male are always born with an extra side, our narrator's sons have five sides whereas his daughter is still just a line. Whereas in our lives we are taught to respect our elders, in Flatland you respect your male children and Grandchildren as they have more sides and are therefore higher up than you.

Does this sound boring and stupid yet? How about this, houses 2 dimensional are built with an East and a West door.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND AND REVISED EDITION, 1884. BY THE EDITOR

Women must only use the East and men the West, this is to avoid accidentally running into each other and she causing a death. The science facts all make sense - what you see in two dimensions as opposed to three dimensions for example but as I said before it really feels like Edwin Abbott is saying "Look how smart I am. Look at the subject matter I have a firm grasp of".

Well Mr Abbott that may well be the case but you obviously never taught English literature because you sure as hell can't write a story of any interest. Not to mention a little bit of a sexiest attitude. This book is 96 pages long and although some 'things' actually do happen it is predominantly about ramming down your throat how weird a 2D world would be. And then again for the stupid he repeats himself.

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View all 12 comments. Se pensavate che Geometria e Politica e Filosofia potessero difficilmente incastrarsi tra loro, vi sbagliavate. Quando poi qualcuno vede o sente, anche per sua non colpa, qualcosa che non andava visto o sentito, viene fatto sparire. Che cosa assurda, si potrebbe pensare. Succede anche da noi.

Quindi tranquilli, a Flatlandia ci ritroverete molto. Non incazzatevi troppo con Abbott se ce l'aveva con le donne. Insomma, Dante ha reagito bene. Ma a volte gli approcci sessuali non vanno a finire in Commedie, sopratutto non in Divine. La mia cartolina da Flatlandia smette qui di essere priva di raziocinio, scusate, ma sono ancora troppo esaltata. View all 4 comments. Jan 28, George rated it really liked it Shelves: Quite a charming allegory for the English society of the time, and boy does it show it's age.

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott

This is basically covered by everyone who reviewed this book, so I am not going to talk about that. What I noticed and I haven't seen anybody mention this yet, is the fact that at the time when this book was written Darwinian evolution has already grasped popular imagination. Just look how he talked about careful pairings between men and women to produce an equilateral triangle and then how each generat Quite a charming allegory for the English society of the time, and boy does it show it's age. Just look how he talked about careful pairings between men and women to produce an equilateral triangle and then how each generation after that is achieved gets more sides until it reaches their version of perfection that is the circle.

As I am aware people looked towards evolution with quite an optimism at the time and started envisioning utopias that will come to existence with careful work, selection and patience. Just look at the squares enlightenment at the prospect of 3 then 4 and as many dimensions it can possibly go.

Now this book, by it's writing style would get 3 stars, but no one can write something that after reading it makes me spend a night thinking about tesseracts 4 dimensional cubes and glomes 4 dimensional spheres and not be rewarded. Both mindfuckery and awesomeness. Oct 18, Alice Cai rated it it was amazing Shelves: That's why the would is called flatland because everything is in 2 dimensions.

It's so trippy and it's really funny too. I can't just give funny quotes though because you need to know the context from the beginning of the chapter and then the context of the chapter before that to get the humor. Some quotes to give an idea of what the book is like: But now, drawing back to the edge of the table, gradually lower your eye thus bringing yourself more and more into the condition of the inhabitants of Flatland , and you will find the penny becoming more and more oval to your view, and at last when you have placed your eye exactly on the edge of the table so that you are, as it were, actually a Flatlander , the penny will then have ceased to appear oval at all and will have become, so far as you can see, a Straight Line.

Our Soldiers and Lowest Class of Workmen are Triangles with two equal sides, each about eleven inches long, and a base or third side so short often not exceeding half an inch that they form at their vertices a very sharp and formidable angle. Indeed, when their bases are of the most degraded type not more than the eighth part of an inch in size , they can hardly be distinguished from Straight Lines or Women; so extremely pointed are their vertices. With us, as with you, these Triangles are distinguished from others by being called Isosceles, and by this name I shall refer to them in the following pages.

The author has been dead for years of course it's legal. The narrator, a shape living in a two-dimensional universe, has his thought-world turned upside down went he meets a mysterious being from a three-dimensional world. This notion of perspective and liberation from one's own perspective gives the work a The narrator, a shape living in a two-dimensional universe, has his thought-world turned upside down went he meets a mysterious being from a three-dimensional world. This notion of perspective and liberation from one's own perspective gives the work a transcendent slyness and power as it offers a freedom beyond whatever the limited conceptions of the author were.

Comes with illustrations showing the exciting worlds of triangles and such. View all 5 comments. Jul 28, Milica Chotra rated it really liked it. This Square hopes that his account "may stir up a race of rebels who shall refuse to be confined to limited Dimensionality": Also, in the first part of the book, Abbott cleverly uses geometrical concepts to criticize his own society e.

Bear in mind that "Flatland" was written in the 19th century, and if you like math, social critique and enjoy pondering the nature of the Universe or Multiverse - you'll like this book. A religious person might experience it on a different level, but I guess they'd like it as well. Aug 16, Paul E. What a fantastic little thought-experiment, only really half-disguised as a story. Through his witty little parable, Abbott manages to explore the physical, mathematical, societal, philosophical and theological without once spoon-feeding his readers OK, maybe there's a little bit of spoon-feeding in the earlier chapters.

It's only a shame, then, that this is without a doubt the most misogynist book I've ever read in my forty-odd years Oh, well; I suppose nothing's perfect Aug 24, Roy Lotz rated it really liked it Shelves: For why should you praise, for example, the integrity of a Square who faithfully defends the interests of his client, when you ought in reality rather to admire the exact precision of his right angles? Or again, why blame a lying Isosceles, when you ought rather to deplore the incurable inequality of his sides?

This is one of those delightful little books, so difficult to review because its charms require no toil to appreciate, and also because the book is so short you might as well read it an For why should you praise, for example, the integrity of a Square who faithfully defends the interests of his client, when you ought in reality rather to admire the exact precision of his right angles? This is one of those delightful little books, so difficult to review because its charms require no toil to appreciate, and also because the book is so short you might as well read it and skip the reviews.

The charm of the book lies in its conceit, rather than its execution.

Indeed, though certainly able, Abbott is not an expert writer; nor does he pretend to be. The genius of this book is in the simple beauty of its premise: What would life be like for a square living in a two-dimensional world? Abbott wrings a remarkable amount out of this simple question. First, he gives us a satire of Victorian culture—perhaps the less enduring part of this work, though certainly keen and ruthless in its modest way.

To me, the most interesting point Abbott makes in his satire has to do with education. The residents of Flatland spend all their time learning various methods to identify the shapes of others. For if you are living on a two-dimensional plane, telling a square from a circle is no easy matter, as they all appear to you as flat lines. But of course, the more fascinating part of the work has to do with dimensions. How would the possibility of two dimensions appear to a one-dimensional creature?

And how would the prospect of three dimensions seem to a two-dimensional creature? To the residents of Flatland, tales of cubes and spheres appear like so much absurd metaphysics. Abbott uses this point to show how narrow is our mental framework, how completely blind we are to realities outside our everyday, commonsense world. Doing so, Abbott elevates this work from novelty to true art.

For after satirizing the world we know, he gives us a glimpse of a world beyond. Mar 16, Jafar rated it really liked it.

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This book is just brilliant. People in this book live in a two-dimensional world. They're not aware of, or can't even imagine, the third dimension. They have simple geometrical shapes like triangles and squares and other polygons. The higher the number of the sides, the higher the individual is in the social hierarchy. Those who have so many sides that they resemble a circle are priests. The land This book is just brilliant. The land is ruled by the Chief Circle. Squares are considered middle-class. Triangles are underclass and soldiers.

The lowest status is given to women who are just straight lines.

Flatland: A romance of many dimensions

He was either mocking the sexism and the rigid social order of the Victorian Britain, or he was a supreme reactionary. Life in two dimensions has its many challenges. As an example — everyone looks like a straight line. Shapes are recognized only when seen from above — in a 3D world. When you live on a plane and see everything on the plane level, everything is just a straight line. The author goes to some length explaining how people can distinguish shapes similar to how 3D creatures like ourselves can have 3D vision.

Life in Flatland is not as boring as you might think. A lot is going on. There are wars and revolutions too. The story is narrated by a smart Square who is visited by a Sphere from a three-dimensional world. It is only a point at first, then becomes a circle growing in size, then a circle shrinking in size, until it disappears. All the while, you have no idea where the circle came from and where it went to.

There are countless fantastical things that the 3D guy can do in your 2D world — all magic to you! Think of the implications for us if there is a fourth spatial dimension and something comes to us from the 4D space. Square is trying to imagine a world of two dimensions, and then taking the hero of the story on a trip to a one dimensional world, and in turn a three dimensional world.

On Education The first part of the book basically describes the world of Flatland, which, as I mentioned, is a world of two dimensions.

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In a way it is pretty difficult to imagine such a world, and how things would actually function considering that we tend to live in a three dimensional world. There have been suggestions that despite living in a three dimensional world, we only see things in two dimensions, but that is something that I would object to because, well, we happen to have something call depth perception that is if both of your eyes are functioning correctly. The other thing that I found a little odd was how the children of the citizens of Flatland would progress up the social ladder, and while that may be the case when there is a system of universal education, this was not necessarily the case in a world without access to such education.

This is where the social criticism of the book comes to fore. Flatland is an incredibly stratified society and the more sides you have, the higher up the social scale you happen to be, until you reach the point of a circle, where you pretty much have an infinite number of sides. However, my problem comes that when citizens of Flatland have children, their children will have one more side that their father women in Flatland are basically lines. This is something that is only taught to those higher up the social ladder. Obviously, the higher orders won, and since that time colour, and any talk of colour, was banned.

This is the thing about education, and that is that the more educated one happens to be, the more options that there tend to be open to them. However, the more knowledge one has, the more threatened those in power happen to be. This is why certain governments will go out of their way to actually ban books. In fact, despite the freedoms that we have today, there are still books being banned in our democratic societies, as well as attacks by certain elements of society against certain books, such as Harry Potter apparently it is designed to indoctrinate children into the Wicca cult. Free and universal education was, and still is, a marvellous development, and actually worked to break down the structures of social classes.

The problem is that these days state schools are being stripped of funding, so if you actually want a good education, then you have to pay for it. For instance, the school that I went to refused point blank to teach evolution because, well, it was a Christian school and in their minds evolution was wrong. I certainly felt the full wrath of that when I handed in a project on dinosaurs only to receive no marks whatsoever because I had written it from the viewpoint of the evolutionist.

Sure, while I accept that some people want to believe in a literal seven day creation, and that they want to scientifically prove that the world was created in seven days good luck with that by the way , the problem is that High School diploma exams tend to all test you based on an evolutionary basis, and good luck walking into first year biology subject and challenging the lecturer that evolution is wrong. Yet not everybody can afford a good education, which means that a lot of people end up at state schools. There are a lot of really intelligent people that end up destroying their lives simply because they do not receive the same level of education as others, or they are dragged into the wrong social group than others.

Me, I was lucky, but not many other people are. Which sometimes makes me wonder whether the reason our governments are progressively underfunding our public education system is to basically keep people stupid. One of the main reasons that a lot of left wing leaning individuals tend to be university educated is because that is where much of your critical thinking comes into play. The nth Dimensions Now, Abbott was a mathematician, and in the same way that he is exploring education, he is also exploring concepts of higher mathematics.

For instance, what would a society restricted to only two, or even one, dimensions be like. Edit Cast Credited cast: King Of Lineland voice Denise Carter A Hexagon voice Marco Diaz A Square voice Catherine Ehlinger Edit Storyline Flatland is a two-dimensional universe occupied by living geometric figures - squares, triangles, circles, etc. One lonely Square must save his two dimensional world from an invasion from the 3rd dimension! Edit Details Official Sites: Edit Did You Know? Trivia "Flatland" was the first computer-animated feature film to be created by one person, without the legion of animators and technical crew required by larger-budgeted animation studios.

Goofs Irregularly-sided inhabitants are supposedly reconfigured or destroyed, yet there are several scalene triangles, and Chromatistes is not only irregularly-shaped, but actually concave in part! You people certainly like your shiny things. Frequently Asked Questions Q: Two "Flatland" movies come out in , within months of each other!

How to tell them apart? Was this review helpful to you? In the end, the monarch of Lineland tries to kill A Square rather than tolerate his nonsense any further. Following this vision, he is himself visited by a three-dimensional sphere named A Sphere. Similar to the "points" in Lineland, the Square is unable to see the sphere as anything other than a circle. The Sphere then levitates up and down through the Flatland, allowing Square to see the circle expand and retract.

The Square is not fully convinced until he sees Spaceland a tridimensional world for himself. This Sphere visits Flatland at the turn of each millennium to introduce a new apostle to the idea of a third dimension in the hopes of eventually educating the population of Flatland. From the safety of Spaceland, they are able to observe the leaders of Flatland secretly acknowledging the existence of the sphere and prescribing the silencing of anyone found preaching the truth of Spaceland and the third dimension. After this proclamation is made, many witnesses are massacred or imprisoned according to caste , including A Square's brother, B.

After the Square's mind is opened to new dimensions, he tries to convince the Sphere of the theoretical possibility of the existence of a fourth and fifth, and sixth The Square then has a dream in which the Sphere visits him again, this time to introduce him to Pointland, whereof the point sole inhabitant, monarch, and universe in one perceives any communication as a thought originating in his own mind cf.

Let us leave this god of Pointland to the ignorant fruition of his omnipresence and omniscience: The Square recognises the identity of the ignorance of the monarchs of Pointland and Lineland with his own and the Sphere's previous ignorance of the existence of higher dimensions. Once returned to Flatland, the Square cannot convince anyone of Spaceland's existence, especially after official decrees are announced that anyone preaching the existence of three dimensions will be imprisoned or executed, depending on caste.

Eventually the Square himself is imprisoned for just this reason, with only occasional contact with his brother who is imprisoned in the same facility. He does not manage to convince his brother, even after all they have both seen. Seven years after being imprisoned, A Square writes out the book Flatland in the form of a memoir, hoping to keep it as posterity for a future generation that can see beyond their two-dimensional existence.

Men are portrayed as polygons whose social status is determined by their regularity and the number of their sides, with a Circle considered the "perfect" shape. On the other hand, women consist only of lines and are required by law to sound a "peace-cry" as they walk, lest they be mistaken face-to-face for a point. The Square evinces accounts of cases where women have accidentally or deliberately stabbed men to death, as evidence of the need for separate doors for women and men in buildings. Classes can be distinguished by the sound of one's voice, but the lower classes have more developed vocal organs, enabling them to feign the voice of a Polygon or even a Circle.

Feeling, practised by the lower classes and women, determines the configuration of a person by feeling one of its angles. The "Art of Sight Recognition", practised by the upper classes, is aided by "Fog", which allows an observer to determine the depth of an object. With this, polygons with sharp angles relative to the observer will fade more rapidly than polygons with more gradual angles.

Colour of any kind is banned in Flatland after Isosceles workers painted themselves to impersonate noble Polygons. The Square describes these events, and the ensuing class war at length. The population of Flatland can "evolve" through the "Law of Nature", which states: Thus the son of a Square is a Pentagon, the son of a Pentagon, a Hexagon; and so on". This rule is not the case when dealing with isosceles triangles Soldiers and Workmen with only two congruent sides. The smallest angle of an Isosceles Triangle gains thirty arc minutes half a degree each generation.

Additionally, the rule does not seem to apply to many-sided Polygons. For example, the sons of several hundred-sided Polygons will often develop fifty or more sides more than their parents. Furthermore, the angle of an Isosceles Triangle or the number of sides of a regular Polygon may be altered during life by deeds or surgical adjustments. An equilateral triangle is a member of the craftsman class.

Squares and Pentagons are the "gentlemen" class, as doctors, lawyers, and other professions. Hexagons are the lowest rank of nobility, all the way up to near Circles, who make up the priest class. The higher-order Polygons have much less of a chance of producing sons, preventing Flatland from being overcrowded with noblemen.

Only regular Polygons are considered until chapter seven of the book when the issue of irregularity, or physical deformity, became considered. To maintain social cohesion, irregularity is to be abhorred, with moral irregularity and criminality cited, "by some" in the book , as inevitable additional deformities, a sentiment with which the Square concurs.

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