From Flatland to Hypergraphics: Interacting with Higher Dimensions
Thomas Banchoff · Interdisciplinary Science Reviews · 1990
Flatland is over one hundred years old, and it has never been more popular than it is now, with five new English editions in the past six years, and translations into eight foreign languages. Much of its social satire is still pertinent today, and it is only now with the advent of modern computer graphics that we can begin to appreciate the challenge of seeing phenomena from higher dimensions which so baffled the two-dimensional protagonist of Edwin Abbott Abbott's little masterpiece. In this review we begin to answer the questions 'who was the author of this book, and how did he come to write it?'