Tag Archives: square
The weather has been so weirdly warm this month that I never got around to a Friday Notes for February, so I’m extending the month. Call it a leap year “plus one”. Truth is, I’m at long last finally starting to reach the bottom of my pile. A lot of what’s left is trivial, silly, or outdated, and I may end up doing a thorough spring cleaning on them.
The ultimate goal is for the Notes to be about contemporaneous things rather than from old notes that have been fermenting in the pile.
But for a bit longer, it’ll be a combination of both, so off we go.
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13 Comments | tags: global warming, language, Lee Smolin, linguistics, Schadenfreude, square, temperature, Weltschmerz | posted in Friday Notes
Consider the lowly square, a four-sided shape with sides of equal length meeting at right angles. The embodiment of what we’re referring to when we refer to square miles, square kilometers, square inches, or square whatevers. The two-dimensional version of any one-dimensional length.
A trivially easy shape to draw, all you need is a straight edge and a compass — the latter for ensuring your corners are right angles (see Plato’s Divided Line for more on using a straight edge and compass). The only simpler shape is the circle.
Yet the simple square threw early mathematicians into a serious tizzy!
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12 Comments | tags: irrational numbers, Pythagoras, square | posted in Brain Bubble, Math
Four years ago I started pondering the tesseract and four-dimensional space. I first learned about them back in grade school in a science fiction short story I’d read. (A large fraction of my very early science education came from SF books.)
Greg Egan touched on tesseracts in his novel Diaspora, which got me thinking about them and inspired the post Hunting Tesseracti. That led to a general exploration of multi-dimensional spaces and rotation within those spaces, but I continued to focus on trying to truly understand the tesseract.
Today we’re going to visit the 4D space inside a tesseract.
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5 Comments | tags: 1D, 2D, 3D, 4D, cube, dimensions, square, tesseract | posted in Math, Sideband
Here on the 4th day of the 4th month, I feel I really should be writing about the 4th dimension. I did say that I would during March Mathness, and I tried to set the math foundation here and here.
But two problems: Firstly, I’m kinda burned out. Those three posts were a bit of work, diagrams & models & math (oh, my!), and then trying to explain them clearly. Secondly, obviously no one finds this interesting except me, so not much motivation for the effort involved. Which was expected (kinda the story of my life). I also said these posts were as much recording my notes as attempts to share.
But it is 4/4 (and no Twins game today), so I thought I’d try winging it anyway.
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20 Comments | tags: 2D, 3D, 3D space, 4D, coordinates, cube, dimensions, square, tesseract | posted in Science
I’ve been hinting all month about rotation, and the time has finally come to dig into the topic. As mentioned, my interest began with wanting to understand what it means to rotate a tesseract — particularly what’s really going on in a common animation that I’ve seen. What’s the math there?
This interest in rotation is part of a larger interest: trying to wrap my head around the idea of a fourth physical dimension. (Time is sometimes called the fourth dimension, but not here.) To make it as easy as possible, for now I’m focusing only on tesseractae, because “squares” are an easy shape.
After chewing at this for a while (the tesseract post was late 2016), just recently new doors opened up, and I think this journey is almost over!
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3 Comments | tags: 2D, 3D, 3D space, 4D, coordinates, cube, dimensions, geometry, line, point, rectangular coordinates, right angle, rotation, square, tesseract | posted in Math
Last week we celebrated Albert Einstein’s birthday (he turned 140). Now we need another cake so we can celebrate the other March major mathematician’s birthday — Emmy Noether turns 137 today.
To my regret, despite that I frequently invoke her name (she co-starred with Albert in the Special Relativity series), her work in mathematics is pretty far above my head, and I’m simply not qualified to write about it. I can say that her work connects mathematical symmetry with physical conservation laws. She also made significant contributions to abstract algebra.
Just recently, I’ve begun to nibble at the edges of the latter in the form of group theory as a part of studying rotation.
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21 Comments | tags: algebra, cube, Emmy Noether, group theory, mathematics, rotation, square, tesseract | posted in Math
If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably spent a fair amount of time wondering what is the deal with tesseracts? Just exactly what the heck is a “four-dimension cube” anyway? No doubt you’ve stared curiously at one of those 2D images (like the one here) that fakes a 3D image of an attempt to render a 4D tesseract.
Recently I spent a bunch of wetware CPU cycles, and made lots of diagrams, trying to wrap my mind around the idea of a tesseract. I think I made some progress. It was an interesting diversion, and at least I think I understand that image now!
FWIW, here’s a post about what I came up with…
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9 Comments | tags: 3D space, coordinates, cube, dimensions, geometry, line, point, rectangular coordinates, right angle, square, tesseract | posted in Math
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