The Anja S.

Greer Conference on Mathematics, Science and Technology

Wednesday June 25, 2014
CWIC Session 8: Jonathan Choate Flatland
2
-Sphereland (The Movie)
Diana Tunnell for MA901A2

In this session we watched the film Flatland
2
- Sphereland. Written and directed by Dano
Johnson, Flatland 2 Sphereland, is an entertaining animated film with the theme of
explaining fundamental mathematical principles that can be confusing for young and old
alike. Sphereland is a recently released sequel to Flatland, a movie based on the short
book by Edwin Abbott, Flatland A Romance of Many Dimensions, published in 1884.
The plot surrounds a budding romance between polygons in a two-dimensional world.
This young pair grows closer through a challenge to save a space mission from disaster.
The story line intertwines a descriptive model of many important aspects of geometry and
mathematics in general. Viewers are exposed to properties of the first, second, third and
even forth dimensions through the perspectives of characters living within the constraints
of each world.
It would be fun and informative to watch and discuss this forty minute video with a
geometry class. The two main characters, Hex and Puncto, live in a two dimensional flat
land. To navigate around each other they must spin and slide out of the way. Think of
living on an air hockey table and not being able to rise from the surface. They visit the
first-dimensional Lineland where they freak out the inhabitants by entering and exiting,
changing length as they do because of the one-dimensional perspective of their vertices.
Hex and Puncto come to learn that the only spatial directions that exist here are left or
right. They then travel with A. Sphere into three-dimensional space, explaining the
mystery of the triangle with more than 180 degrees and where a line is not always straight!
Here the characters find it awkward to get close when there is more than one plane
involved. The harrowing tale of the misguided Flatland space mission is finally resolved by
the hero and heroine hexagons, but not before their introduction to the oracle of the fourth
dimension. This piece is a clever addition as it puts the viewers in the same predicament as
the characters as we try to understand an environment that is beyond what our senses
allow us to understand.

This cute video entertains with its wit, excitement, and romance. It also proves quite
useful in allowing the viewer to experience a taste of what it would be like to live an
existence constrained differently than ours. Flatland
2
- Sphereland would be worth the
class period needed to include it into a geometry curriculum.