![]() During his travels he-and the readers-get an artful geometry lesson. A three-dimensional visitor moves into this world and brings one of the inhabitants out to see a richer geometry. Women, being line-like, have the fewest sides of all and stand at the very bottom of the rigid hierarchy. Each inhabitant has a social role fixed by birth and determined by its number of sides. In Flatland, Edwin Abbott starts with an extended description of a dour and forbidding two-dimensional world. The more recent book also touches upon physics, giving brief descriptions of modern concerns about quantum theory, particle physics, and cosmology. Ian Stewart's Flatterland, an update of Flatland, gives us a perspective on the social concerns and the richer geometry of our own era. ![]() The earlier work, a product of the late Victorian era, brings us to see how worlds of one or two or four dimensions might appear to their respective inhabitants. They each follow an inhabitant of a two-dimensional space whose mathematical and social viewpoint is expanded through the miraculous appearance of a visitor from a higher. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 45.3 (2002) 472-474įlatterland and its predecessor Flatland (first published in 1884) present popularized and generally accessible views of the modern geometry of their respective times. ![]()
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