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If you find a modern-day difficultly with Abbott's gender inequality (a clear challenge to some animators),consider that orthogonal planes do indeed look like lines to each other. We.turn to adornment to reveal a contrived identity, whether true or deceitful. An enchanting read at any age.
indistinguishable from others. Instead, if we were to expand the dimensionality of our perception we could see inside both the male and female planes. Another human then turned to her side orthogonal to the first would then appear just a line.
Read aloud, Abbotts' Shakespearean flare rings out with lovely sounds as wonderful to ears of a toddler at bedtime as it is to an adult with spirited imagination or any rebel who enjoys the venting of 'dangerous utterances'. flat human is turned on his side, his personality is hidden inside the plane. " (Peterson, Flatland Point: The DRUM & DRAW Navigations, 2009)
I recommend it for younger readers so that they may have many years to re-read and grow with it. "When.
Buy the MobiPocket version for the same price. There's also no table of contents. It's a much better format This edition is terrible on the Kindle. There's all sorts of extra line breaks that make it difficult to read.
Reading reviews on this little gem of a novelette I have owned for over 33 years now, I see most have completely missed the point. Galileo, who expanded the universe a thousand fold, was put into house arrest by the inquisition.those priests refusing to "look through his tube" (a telescope). Although Abbott's little book has been embraced by generations, used as a guide to kiddy schoolers in understanding geometry, its message runs much deeper. It is the story that parallels all those who became a majority of one, all those who have seen further than others, to all who examine a pretty shell at the beach and realize there is a sea of knowledge before them, to all who have dared to step outside the box.
Someday they will learn how to tax it". We pay the Edison company for a Nikola Tesla product (the inventor of alternating current). When demonstrating the first electro-magnetic device, Faraday was asked what good is it. The history and drama of the discoverer is the story of "square", his newly acquired cosmological knowledge through meeting "sphere", and what happened when he tried to disclose it to flatlanders. His response, "I don't know.what good is a newborn baby. Square states this clearly: "inspired people are always considered by the majority to be mad".
Tesla died almost forgotten and penniless. "Square" was a spacelander in a world of flatlanders. It is an illustration of mankind's effect on innovators who disclose knowledge at the cosmological level. Those are the innovators who have stepped out of flatland into spaceland and were subsequently denounced and ridiculed.
To my surprise, the book is as much about the foibles and prejudices of England's class-based society as it is about the explanation of contemplating more dimensions than one can directly perceive. Still, a short, intriguing read for those who like to think about abstract concepts, both mathematical and political.
Donald J. Recommended.
Like many readers and reviewers, I heard of Flatland long before I got around to reading it. A good, ground-breaking book, clearly ahead of its time, but neither a light, pleasant read nor especially deep on the substantive topic.
Bingle, Author of Forced Conversion and GREENSWORD: A Tale of Extreme Global Warming. I expected it to be conversational in tone, but all about the geometry of one, two, three, and four dimensional space.
While it has valuable insights on both dimensional space and class politics and mobility, as well as a light, humorous, conversational tone, the mix is an odd one, and ultimately a combination that is bound to be a bit disappointing to those reading it solely for the math and those reading it solely for the social commentary.
This is a must read for any math lover or sci-fi fan. Flatland is quite an interested and at times, mindblowing piece of writing. The novella length story can be seen as an expansive, yet fictitious look a a unique and possible world or can be perceived as an interesting look at our world from a vantage unlike any other and in this, there are many strong implications.
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