SOURCE: Peterson, Ivars. “Shadows from a Higher Dimension.” Science News 126, no. 18 (3 November 1984): 284-85.

In the following essay, Peterson surveys the themes of Flatland and its influence on modern students of both mathematics and literature.

Flatland is a thin book—about 100 pages of Victorian prose that now seems somewhat quaint and old-fashioned. Yet, for a century, the book's central figure and narrator, “A Square,” has enticed innumerable readers into a two-dimensional world where a race of rigid geometric forms live and love, work and play.

Edwin A. Abbott's narrative begins: “Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows—only hard and with luminous edges—and you will then have a...