When I was probably ten or twelve years old, I remember that the book Flatland by Edwin Abbott somehow came to my attention, probably through something related to Martin Gardner’s Mathematical Recreations column in Scientific American. It is an interesting book that tries to present an easy-to-understand example of how we might visualize four dimensional space by hypothesizing a two dimensional world, inhabited by beings who can only perceive the two dimensional world around them. The narrator, who is a simple square, dreams that he visits a one dimensional world, and tries to convince its inhabitants of the existance of two dimensions. He’s then visited by a Sphere, a 3 dimensional being who helps him perceive the three and more dimensions that he inhabits.

It’s kind of a fun book, and being written in 1884, it’s in the public domain and available in a wide variety of formats and sites which you can find on Wikipedia. Interestingly, it’s going to be made into an animated educational film, with Martin Sheen as the vocal talent. Check out the trailer here.

[tags]Mathematics,Flatland[/tags]