Flatland

Reviewing my list of books in a previous blog. I realised that I made numerous oversights but one that seemed glaring would be the inclusion of the seminal work Flatland written in 1884 by Edwin Abbot Abbot. This remarkable book fits very well in my selection of works that were post modern even before their time. The story of a society that only lives in a two-dimensional world as told by a square!

Abbot like Charles Dodgson was a keen student of mathematics and a typical Victorian polymath. He wrote on subjects as varied as Anglican theology, Shakespeare and the life of Francis Bacon. He is however best remembered for his short novel that has all the trappings of a cyberpunk adventure and the manners and mores of late nineteenth century polite society. The humble square, who is the narrator of the story, explains the world he lives in. Women in this world are lines and are forced to sway backwards and forwards all the time as otherwise in a 2-D world they might be taken for a point. Our hero meets a sphere and travels to a three dimensional world which at first he can not see at all. The moral of the work however, is ultimately one of solipsism. He fails to convince his fellow 2-D citizens of the existence of another dimension and is branded a heretic.

It is worth noting the famous story that after Queen Victoria had read Dodgsons’ Alice in Wonderland published under his pseudonym of Lewis Carroll, that she demanded copies of all his works. She was a little taken aback when such volumes as “An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, With Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraic Equations” arrived.

Mathematics can lead to fanciful speculation and otherworldliness but t also ends up as sums!