Edwin Abbott Abbott was an English schoolmaster and theologian, most famous as the author of the social satire Flatland, widely noted for its use of mathematical dimensions in religious and political allegories. Flatland depicts a nightmarish dystopia in which living geometrical figures persecute irregular figures and condemn straight lines, or females, to perpetual ignorance and subservience. The novel is divided into two parts: a preface and the “central event,” as Abbott calls it. The mathematician A. Square describes his two-dimensional world, Flatland, for an audience in Spaceland, a three-dimensional world. The government of Flatland is administered by a cabal of many-sided polygons who promote a societal hierarchy that ascends gradually from straight lines to circles. In between are irregular or isosceles triangles, the soldiers and working class; equilateral triangles, who are the tradesmen; squares and pentagons, who represent the professional classes, such as lawyers and mathematicians; and polygons of more sides, including hexagons, who enjoy the status of nobility… Although Flatland was not ignored when it was published, it did not obtain a great success. In the entry on Edwin Abbott in the Dictionary of National Biography, Flatland is not even mentioned. The book was discovered again after Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity was published, which brought to prominence the concept of a fourth dimension. You can listen online to free English audiobook “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions” by Edwin Abbott Abbott on our website.
