the.com/flatland
A universe so flat, even the squares think they're cultured.
means A two-dimensional world or way of thinking — flat in the literal sense of having no depth, or figuratively, a mindset that can't conceive of dimensions beyond its own.
from Popularized by Edwin Abbott Abbott's 1884 novella 'Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions,' which imagined a world inhabited by geometric shapes — squares, triangles, lines — who literally cannot perceive the third dimension, using it to satirize Victorian social rigidity and class hierarchy. The word itself is a simple compound of 'flat' and 'land,' but the book is what gave it its lasting charge: a flatland now means any mind or place too two-dimensional to imagine more.
- author
- Edwin Abbott, a Victorian schoolmaster, wrote it in 1884
- real purpose
- satirized Victorian class rigidity and gender oppression
- plot device
- a Square gets visited by a 3D Sphere, loses his mind
- legacy
- became required reading for understanding higher dimensions