Explain this
Flatland: The Movie
How the publisher describes it:
“Flatland: The Movie is an exciting half-hour animated film based on Edwin Abbott's classic novel. Flatland is an entirely two-dimensional world where different shapes live, work, and play - all under the rule of the evil Circles who are determined to keep the third dimension a secret, at any cost.”
Review by Geoff Faux
In brief:
This DVD takes the plot of Abbot's book, updates it, and produces some stunning visuals and dialogue that can be understood at several levels.
“Why is it so difficult for those of us who live in 3 dimensions to imagine fourth, fifth, sixth...dimensional space”
I first met the book Flatland as an O level student. It was written in 1884 by Edwin Abbott with the alias ‘by A Square’. I have a copy and, when teaching, I used to quote and use the ideas of the book. But I never had the courage to use the book directly with any of my pupils. Why, when it is so full of metaphors, was I not able to use it? The answer to that question is complex but it is around style and language and discontinuities between the society in middle class England in 1884 and teenagers in the 20th or 21st century.
Edwin Abbott, the author, was not only taking a shot at asking people to extend their ideas of space but also challenging the structure of the society he lived in. The inhabitants of his Flatland were male polygons. The more sides a polygon possessed the higher he was up the social scale, with the high priests, who were in charge, being perfect circles. The women were line segments who had to keep wiggling their bottoms (a stationary line segment would be invisible end on) so that they did not inadvertently murder a man by allowing him to run himself upon her, on the sharp bit! A lot of the language, sentence construction and the roles of men and women in the book feels to come from another age, as indeed it does.
This DVD takes the plot of Abbot’s book, updates it, and produces some stunning visuals and dialogue that can be understood at several levels. Suddenly there is an accessible way of opening up ideas of one, two, three, and then, by analogy, four dimensional space.
Here is direct access to some of these bigger ideas. It’s a story and a metaphor. But most importantly it’s a beautifully made animated film. It starts with a simple idea, ‘if you live in 2 dimensions, how can you possibly imagine what it would be like to live in 3 dimensions?’ and, by a quick wave of the hand ‘Why is it so difficult for those of us who live in 3 dimensions to imagine fourth, fifth, sixth...dimensional space’?
The film gives a way of talking about the idea of dimension, degrees of freedom and, depending on the audience, ways of thinking about transformations, connections between algebra and geometry and much more. On the other hand it can just be watched and left to mature in a pupils experience, perhaps producing an insight or niggle years later.
School mathematics often seems to be quite disconnected from what mathematics is about. Much of what happens in mathematics teaching in school is tied up with learning routine skills and procedures that many pupils will, possibly, never need. Where is the time and space to expose them to some of the things that interest and charm those of us who enjoy mathematics?
Where are the chances for children to:
- work with the infinite;
- engage with fantasy;
- experience magic;
or know that they can write down a number that no-one else has ever written down?
Children need to engage with some of the big ideas that Mathematicians work on. ‘What if’ questions, and ‘what if not’ questions. I have been wondering how to challenge what I see as the paucity of much of school mathematics teaching when ‘Flatland - The Movie’, dropped through my letterbox. Here is a DVD I can use across the age range.
Geoff Faux •
Language: English
Subtitles: English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Greek
Aspect Ratio: 16:9 - 1.78:1
