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Amazon.co.uk Review
With Flatterland, Ian Stewart returns with more fantastically mind-bending mathematical puzzles. In 1884, an amiably eccentric clergyman and literary scholar named Edwin Abbott Abbott published an odd philosophical novel called Flatland, in which he explored such things as four-dimensional mathematics and gently satirised some of the orthodoxies of his time. The book went on to be a bestseller in Victorian England, and it has remained in print ever since.
With Flatterland, Stewart, professor of mathematics at the University of Warwick, updates the science of Flatland, adding literally countless dimensions to Abbott's scheme of things. ("Your world has not just four dimensions," one of his characters proclaims, "but five, fifty, a million, or even an infinity of them! And none of them need be time. Space of a hundred and one dimensions is just as real as a space of three dimensions.") Along his fictional path, Stewart touches on Feynman diagrams, superstring theory, time travel, quantum mechanics and black holes, among many other topics. And, in Abbott's spirit, Stewart pokes fun at our own assumptions, including our quest for a Theory of Everything.
You can't help but be charmed by a book with characters named Superpaws, the Hawk King, the Projective Lion and the Space Hopper, and one dotted with doggerel such as "You ain't nothin' but a hadron / nucleifyin' all the time" and "I can't get no / more momentum". And, best of all, you can learn a thing or two about modern mathematics while being roundly entertained. That's no small accomplishment, and one for which Stewart deserves applause. --Gregory McNamee
Review
Overly cute sequel to British mathematician Edwin Abbott's 1884 classic "Flatland", from the "Scientific American "recreational math columnist. In his introduction, Stewart (Mathematics/Warwick University) says he got a "bee in his bonnet" to continue Abbott's whimsical fantasy of life experienced in a two-dimensional universe. Though there have been other "Flatland "sequels, Stewart ("Life's Other Secret: The New Mathematics of the Living World", 1998, etc.) was fascinated with the way Abbott used science, in the form of the looming threat of a Fourth Dimension and the eerie visitation of a Promethean circle, to laugh at the narrow-mindedness of English Victorians. He also wanted to have some fun: in "Flatterland", set a century after the events of "Flatland", the precocious adolescent Vikki Line learns that her great-great-grandfather Albert Square (a Square who learned that he, too, could become a Circle) died in prison. "He was the black shape of the family," her father, Grosvenor Square, recalls. Vikki stumbles on a copy of "Flatland "(books are actually a series of dots and dashes on a wire), decodes a cipher that helps her hook up a Virtual Unreality device to her computer, access the Interline, discover a smiley-faced Space Hopper and embark on a tour of Planiturth, where, among other things, "the fundamental unit . . . is the philosophon, a unit of logic so tiny that only a philosopher can split it." Vikki must thwart the anti-intellectual (and antifeminist) suspicions of the older generation as she learns about topology, gets a quick course in quantum mechanics, zooms off to visit black holes in the Domain of the (Stephen) Hawk King and eventually gazes in rapture at existence viewed in a ten-dimensional supermanifold. Cloying, pun-filled tour of late-20th-century mathematics, physics and cosmology: high twee for the science set. (Kirkus Reviews)
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Seen from space, it was a strange world, with the austere beauty of a page from Euclid. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Seen from space, it was a strange world, with the austere beauty of a page from Euclid. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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