In physics and mathematics, the dimension of a mathematical space is informally defined as the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify any point within it. Thus, a line has a dimension of one (1D) because only one coordinate is needed to specify a point on it – for example, the point at 5 on a number line. A surface, such as the boundary of a cylinder or sphere, has a dimension of two (2D) because two coordinates are needed to specify a point on it – for example, both a latitude and longitude are required to locate a point on the surface of a sphere. A two-dimensional Euclidean space is a two-dimensional space on the plane. The inside of a cube, a cylinder or a sphere is three-dimensional (3D) because three coordinates are needed to locate a point within these spaces.
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is a satirical novella by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott, first published in 1884 by Seeley & Co. of London. 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.
Rudolf von Bitter Rucker is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which both won Philip K. Dick Awards. He edited the science fiction webzine Flurb until its closure in 2014.
Charles Howard Hinton was a British mathematician and writer of science fiction works titled Scientific Romances. He was interested in higher dimensions, particularly the fourth dimension. He is known for coining the word "tesseract" and for his work on methods of visualising the geometry of higher dimensions.
Flatterland is a 2001 book written by mathematician and science popularizer Ian Stewart about non-Euclidean geometry. It was written as a sequel to Flatland, an 1884 novel that discussed different dimensions.
The Planiverse is a novel by A. K. Dewdney, written in 1984 about a two-dimensional world.
Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity is a book by American novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace that examines the history of infinity, focusing primarily on the work of Georg Cantor, the 19th-century German mathematician who created set theory. The book is part of the W. W. Norton "Great Discoveries" series.
Four-dimensional space (4D) is the mathematical extension of the concept of three-dimensional space (3D). Three-dimensional space is the simplest possible abstraction of the observation that one needs only three numbers, called dimensions, to describe the sizes or locations of objects in the everyday world. For example, the volume of a rectangular box is found by measuring and multiplying its length, width, and height. This concept of ordinary space is called Euclidean space because it corresponds to Euclid's geometry, which was originally abstracted from the spatial experiences of everyday life.
Sphereland: A Fantasy About Curved Spaces and an Expanding Universe is a 1965 translation of Bolland : een roman van gekromde ruimten en uitdijend heelal, a 1957 novel by Dionys Burger, and is a sequel to Flatland, a novel by "A Square". The novel expands upon the social and mathematical foundations on which Flatland is based. It is markedly different from the first novel in that it has a more prosaic ending and treatment of society.
Popular mathematics is mathematical presentation aimed at a general audience. Sometimes this is in the form of books which require no mathematical background and in other cases it is in the form of expository articles written by professional mathematicians to reach out to others working in different areas.
Spaceland is a science fiction novel by American mathematician and computer scientist Rudy Rucker, and published in 2002 by Tor Books.
Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions is the debut non-fiction book by Lisa Randall, published in 2005, about particle physics in general and additional dimensions of space in particular. The book has made it to top 50 at amazon.com, making it the world's first successful book on theoretical physics by a female author. She herself characterizes the book as being about physics and the multi-dimensional universe. The book describes, at a non-technical level, theoretical models Professor Randall developed with the physicist Raman Sundrum, in which various aspects of particle physics are explained in a higher-dimensional braneworld scenario. These models have since generated thousands of citations.
Flatland is a 2007 American animated science fiction film based on the 1884 novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott. The film was directed and animated by Ladd Ehlinger Jr. in Lightwave 3D. The screenplay was written by author Tom Whalen. The music was composed by Mark Slater.
Dionys Burger was a Dutch secondary school physics teacher and author of the novel Sphereland.
A New Era of Thought is a non-fiction work written by Charles Howard Hinton, published in 1888 and reprinted in 1900 by Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Ltd., London. A New Era of Thought is about the fourth dimension and its implications on human thinking. It influenced the work of P.D. Ouspensky, particularly his book Tertium Organum where it is frequently quoted; Scientific American writer Martin Gardner, who mentioned this book in some of his articles; and Rudy Rucker's The Fourth Dimension. It is prefaced by Alicia Boole and H. John Falk. A New Era of Thought is inspired by Plato's allegory of the cave and is influenced by the works of Immanuel Kant, Carl Friedrich Gauss and Nikolai Lobachevsky. The book has xvi and 230 pages.
Flatland: The Movie is a short animated film which was released to video in 2007. The cast includes the voices of actors Martin Sheen, Kristen Bell and Tony Hale. The story is based on the 1884 science fiction novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions written by Edwin A. Abbott.
In a publishing career spanning 80 years (1930–2010), popular mathematics and science writer Martin Gardner (1914–2010) authored or edited over 100 books and countless articles, columns and reviews.
The idea of a fourth dimension has been a factor in the evolution of modern art, but use of concepts relating to higher dimensions has been little discussed by academics in the literary world. From the late 19th century onwards, many writers began to make use of possibilities opened up by the exploration of such concepts as hypercube geometry. While many writers took the fourth dimension to be one of time, others preferred to think of it in spatial terms, and some associated the new mathematics with wider changes in modern culture.
Hiding in the Mirror is a popular science book by the theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Krauss. The text was initially published on October 20, 2005 by Viking Press. This is his seventh non-fiction book.
Algebra and Tiling: Homomorphisms in the Service of Geometry is a mathematics textbook on the use of group theory to answer questions about tessellations and higher dimensional honeycombs, partitions of the Euclidean plane or higher-dimensional spaces into congruent tiles. It was written by Sherman K. Stein and Sándor Szabó, and published by the Mathematical Association of America as volume 25 of their Carus Mathematical Monographs series in 1994. It won the 1998 Beckenbach Book Prize, and was reprinted in paperback in 2008.
