Edwin A Abbott

Edwin Abbott Abbott (1838-1926), the author of more than fifty books on classics, theology, history, and Shakespeare, was headmaster of the City of London School and one of the leading educators of his time. Thomas Banchoff is professor emeritus of mathematics at Brown University and author of Beyond the Third Dimension. In 1884, Edwin Abbott Abbott wrote a mathematical adventure set in a two-dimensional plane world, populated by a hierarchical...

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is a satirical novel. Written pseudonymously by "A Square", the book used the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland to comment on the hierarchy of Victorian culture, but the novella's more enduring contribution is its examination of dimensions. The story describes a two-dimensional world occupied by geometric figures, whereof women are simple line-segments, while men are polygons with various numbers of...

Philochristus by Edwin A. Abbott is a fictional memoir of the life of Jesus Christ and a heavily researched essay on the works of historians, Jewish writings, and Scripture. Excerpt: "Forasmuch as almost all those disciples who with me saw the Lord Jesus in the flesh, are now fallen asleep, and I am well stricken in years and daily expect the summons of the Lord; it hath therefore seemed good to me to bequeath unto you some memorial of Christ in writing;...

ALMOST every English boy can be taught to write clearly, so far at least as clearness depends upon the arrangement of words. Force, elegance, and variety of style are more difficult to teach, and far more difficult to learn, but clear writing can be reduced to rules. To teach the art of writing clearly is the main object of these Rules and Exercises. Ambiguity may arise, not only from bad arrangement! but also from other causes from the misuse of...