Book Review 14/200 - 4/5 - 'Flatland', Edwin A. Abbott - Fiction - Mathematical/Satirical

For more than 100 years, Abbott’s mathematical adventure has charmed, fascinated and perplexed many readers. Being a Physics major, I resonated with the author’s worldview from page one as it’s set in a world on one plane, in only two dimensions, the Flatland, as it’s known to be, and he takes readers on a journey not dissimilar to that of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass.

Our main protagonist is a Square (yes, an actual square), who lives in this flat world where all inhabitants are geometric shapes bound by class and hierarchy, and the measure of a person is by their length and width. Square’s world is opened when a Circular stranger whisks him off the Land of the 3rd Dimension, and even more remarkable is trying to explain it to those still living in 2D.

In times past, Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking have both reflected and on and postulated about the effects of Flatland in terms of one's worldview. Sagan recreates the thought experiment as a set-up to discussing the possibilities of higher dimensions of the physical universe in both his book and television series Cosmos, whereas Hawking noted in his lectures and books the peculiarity of life in two-dimensional space.

While lawyers don’t like Maths at the best of times, this is one of the rare novels Math and Philosophy that will find universal appeal. It’s also simultaneously brilliant as Flatland is a parody of Victorian society through the lens of relativity and concepts of dimension and space.