
Flatland: A Forgivably Flat Classic - jaybol
http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/a-forgivably-flat-classic
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jschuur
I recommend the movie too. There's 2 of them, make sure you watch the half
hour one with Martin Sheen, Michael York and Kristen Bell:

<http://www.flatlandthemovie.com>

The full length 95 minute one is less favorably held.

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jarin
I just wanted to point out that the mouseover tones on the navigation on that
site are great. Is that a pentatonic scale?

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jacquesm
Computers should be seen, not heard.

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kennethn
I also recommend A.K. Dewdney's The Planiverse, published in 1984. It tells
the story of computer science students who communicate with denizens of a 2D
world. The diagrams and graphics are delightful.

I read it when it came out (I was 13) and it's one of the reasons I entered
computing.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Planiverse>

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auxbuss
Wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland> with links to e-versions:
epub, kindle, etc. via Project Gutenberg.

And, new to me, Project Gutenberg provides QR codes for phone download. Nice.

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iuguy
Another great book from a similar period: The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose
Pierce - <http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/972> \- Definitely one to have in
the toilet.

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vaughnkoch
If you're thinking of getting the annotated version, another classic in the
same spirit is The Annotated Alice by Martin Gardner. It exposes a lot of
double entendres, mathematical games, and other historical stuff about Alice
in Wonderland that shows how much of a playful mathematician Lewis Carroll
was.

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ljf
It's a truely brilliant book, pretty short and an excellent holiday/weekend
read.

Link to a html version of the book with original illustrations:
<http://xahlee.org/flatland/index.html>

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monkeypizza
seconding dewdney's planiverse. Also, I loved rudy rucker's spaceland.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceland_(novel)>

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jacquesm
Flatland is a great little book, highly recommended. It's from a time when
writers would stop when they had no more to say instead of being paid by the
word or to fit a particular format so don't be surprised by how much stuff is
crammed in to it's 100 pages, if it were released in 2011 it would surely be
300 pages at a minimum, and it would lose a lot of its power because of that.

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coderholic
I read it recently. Great short read. Extremely sexist, but I guess it's a
book of its time. Got me thinking hard about higher dimensions for a while,
until my head started hurting :)

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jawee
I´m pretty sure that´s part of the point of the book; in addition to the
obvious, it is also social commentary on views on women at the time of its
writing.

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jawee
for a citation, the preface to the second edition includes this:

[A. Square] has himself modified his own personal views, both as regards to
Women and as regards the Isosceles or Lower Classes...But, writing as a
Historian, he has identified himself (perhaps too closely) with the views
generally adopted by Flatland, and (as he has been informed) even by Spaceland
Historians; in whose pages (until very recent times) the destinies of Women
and of the masses of mankind have seldom been deemed worthy of mention and
never of careful consideration.

In the preface to Flatterland, a sequel of sorts, Ian Stewart explains that
¨Abbott was, in fact, a social reformer who believed in equal education
opportunity for all social classes and genders; Flatland´s narrow-minded
social system is his cry of frustration¨ as he wished to ¨satirize the rigid
social structure of Victorian England...especially the lowly status accorded
to women.¨

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chillitom
<http://www.gutenberg.org/files/201/201-h/201-h.htm> \-- read the book here..
got to love Gutenberg

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igravious
And browsing by author: <http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/a#a64>

+1 for Gutenberg, best site for brain-food on the net after Wiki P.

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mturmon
I found this book to be quite tedious. The whole class analogy (a satirical
story line in which many-sided polygons are regarded as more refined than,
say, triangles and squares) was just unbearably long-winded to me. I've read
the whole critique so many times before.

And the notion that the reader will appreciate the three-dimensional space we
live in (or 4-dimensional space-time, if you're like that) by going through a
novella-length treatment of a 2d world...did not work for me, let's just say.

If you like the book, and many do, I'm glad. But it's not unanimous.

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cletus
Flatland now always reminds me of the Big Bang Theory:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmiXemW_oBQ>

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jschuur
Figures that Sheldon would consider himself a higher level hexagon.

And that he thought Raj should go after a simple line segment.

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crgwbr
In Flatland, all women are portrayed as line segments

