When your name is Edwin Abbott Abbott and you're writing a novel as "A Square" (his pseudonym), there is a certain sense of humour involved. Amazingly, Abbott was an English schoolmaster, and his novel "Flatland" is not only well known through Sheldon Cooper from "The Big Bang Theory", but mainly because of Albert Einstein's introduction of the possibility of a fourth dimension which made "Flatland" suddenly a visionary piece of writing, way ahead of its time. Einstein mentions Abbott's intuition of the importance of time to explain certain phenomena. "Flatland" is no mathematical essay, it is mainly a fantastic story with a lot of social satire of the Victorian society during its time.