Square is a mild-mannered inhabitant of Flatland who is conventional in every way until he is visited by an other-worldly creature: a Sphere. Square leaves two-dimensional Flatland to visit one-dimensional Lineland and Sphere's home, the three-dimensional Spaceland. Edwin Abbott Abbott's novella is both a satire of the rigid social structures of Victorian England and a mind-bending look at the mathematical possibilities of the world around us. For this second reason, Abbott's charming thought experiment is much loved by students and teachers of mathematics, physics and computer science.
