Marooned in Möbius

Gearfuse already knows the work of Vi Hart, whose knack for illustrating tricky math by combining deft and elegant doodling with Internet-video vernacular is winning and effective. In the video above she loosely adapts the conceit at the heart of Flatland, Edward Abott Abott’s Victorian novella-of-ideas about life in two dimensions. In the way it works out the practical and social implications of the 2-D world, Abbott’s book calls to mind the worldbuilding satire of Jonathan Swift, as well as the mathematically playful work of Abott’s contemporary, Lewis Carroll. Vi Hart’s version of the conceit owes a secret debt to The Little Prince; trapped in a tiny infinity, the triangular protagonist faces dilemmas that are more existential than mathematical. Or perhaps the existential and the mathematical simply turn out to be the two edges of an infinite loop merging into one. —via Brainpickings