My senior year of high school, back in Dunedin, Florida, I took a series of dual enrollment courses for college credit. The same professor taught all of them.

I wish I could remember his name, because he was the man who introduced me to Edwin Abbot’s mathematical/philosophical classic, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. And Edwin Abbot was born on this day in 1838.

If you haven’t read Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, well, there’s no good reason why not. It’s short. It’s an easy read. And it’s a wonderfully inventive and enjoyable way to explore epistemic and spatial concepts (the book is about two dimensional beings, their inability to truly understand  three dimensionality, and about resistance to new concepts).