ABSTRACT
In the 1880s, Edwin Abbott wrote a classic book about the idea of dimensions that has been reprinted more than six times (Abbott, 1952). Abbott was a schoolteacher writing about a society of objects that inhabited a land he called Flatland. There
were no solids in Flatland. Instead, objects existed in two dimensions and were viewed along their edge. This means geometric shapes had lengths and widths, but because they had no height, they always looked like a line. As shown in Figure 1, this is much like a circle first standing on its edge so you can see its threedimensional face and then laid flat on a table so that only the edge is visible. Unable to rise above this edge view meant circles always appear as a line in Flatland.
