Re: The Very Very First Sentence
| From: | Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, February 14, 2004, 9:20 |
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Thank you, it was quite interesting reading it. It
remembers me very much of George Gamow's book, 'One,
two, three... infinite', which I read when I was in my
teens and was stolen from me some day, or maybe
disappeared in 4th dimension. (But it looks like we
can make it appear again by the power of Amazon and a
few bucks).
Gamow of course wrote no romance, but mathematical
vulgarization. He also uses very much Analogy to make
us understand for instance what could be an
'hypercube', which Abbott called an extra-cube I
think.
At the moment, my concern is not so much about
hypothetical 2-dimensional beings (looks like the
Cards in Carroll's Alice), but about language
primitives we need, we being 'normal' 3-d people, to
describe a 2- (or less) -d world. So I'm not trying to
fancy about 2d living beings, because nobody ever saw
any one (let's except some actresses out of charity):
I think of a 2d-world as a purely geometrical one, and
that is quite well known to everybody who learned a
little of geometry at school. (NB: there is also
3d-geometry, of course). The question is: what
concepts, and what words, do we need to describe such
a word, or rather: which ones do we NOT need ?
--- jcowan@REUTERSHEALTH.COM wrote:
> Philippe Caquant scripsit:
>
>
> 2d (and 1d and even 0d) worlds are described in
> detail in Edwin Abbott's
> mathematical fiction _Flatland: A Romance of Many
> Dimensions_.
> The text is available at
>
http://www.gutenberg.net/etext94/flat11.txt .
> There is also a French translation by Elisabeth
> Gille (Editions
> Denole, 1968, reprinted 1984), but I don't know the
> title.
>
> Most of the book is about the 2d world; the 1d and
> 0d worlds
> are visited in Sections 13-14 and 20.
> --
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