Wednesday, April 23

Tesseracts and friends

Is a tesseract a 4d hypercube of dimensions of the ratio 1:1:1:1, or could any polychoron fit the bill? Anyone have any experience of drawing hypercuboids? And rotating them?

6 comments:

Sophia said...

What on earth are you talking about?:-)

I think it's probably safe to say that my answer to Q2 and 3 is 'no'. But perhaps they were a bit rhetorical...

Liam said...

Sorry. Have been a bit heavily into the subject and the jargon is... well, fun.

Hypercubes. Oh come one, *everyone* loves hypercubes. Like a square is to a line, like a square is to a cube, so a 4d hypercube is to a cube. There's 8 cells in one, I think, each one cube in size. But folded up inside each other. As you will see if you explore this one.

More about Hypercubes here.

Nixoniad said...

Yes.
No, a tesseract is a regular four-dimensional polychoron - a hypercube of unit size.
No (well, I don't).
No (well, I don't).

Why are you getting involved in visualising the fourth dimension? This can be dangerous (see below...)

Links! CH Hinton, the bigamous inventor of the word "tesseract", who invented a gunpowder-fuelled bowling machine!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Charles_Howard_Hinton

The classic Robert Heinlein short story about an architect who accidentally builds a tesseract-shaped house:
http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/
classics/classics_archive/heinlein/
heinlein1.html

A rather good Lovecraftian short story about Hinton and the Fourth Dimension
http://www.ebookmall.com/ebook/92755-ebook.htm

And a non-fiction piece by the same author about Hinton
http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2001/cur0101.htm

Liam said...

Yes, read the Heinlein story a while back. Hadn't seen the Lovecraftian one, though, thanks.

Am drawing points in 4d space, reproducing as a 4-d hypercuboid sitting centrally in a tesseract and rotating the lot through one dimension. Slowly.

Nixoniad said...

WHY?

Liam said...

Because it was Friday. What do you do on Fridays?