Tag Archives: square

July 1, 2020

Sideband #69: Inside a Tesseract

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.

4 Comments | tags: 1D, 2D, 3D, 4D, cube, dimensions, square, tesseract | posted in Math, Sideband

April 4, 2019

The 4th Dimension

By Wyrd Smythe

Here on the 4^th day of the 4^th month, I feel I really should be writing about the 4^th 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.

16 Comments | tags: 2D, 3D, 3D space, 4D, coordinates, cube, dimensions, square, tesseract | posted in Science

March 27, 2019

Pondering Going Around

By Wyrd Smythe

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!

2 Comments | tags: 2D, 3D, 3D space, 4D, coordinates, cube, dimensions, geometry, line, point, rectangular coordinates, right angle, rotation, square, tesseract | posted in Math

March 23, 2019

It’s A Noether Day!

By Wyrd Smythe

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.

20 Comments | tags: algebra, cube, Emmy Noether, group theory, mathematics, rotation, square, tesseract | posted in Math

August 17, 2016

Hunting Tesseracti

By Wyrd Smythe

tesseract-00 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…

2 Comments | tags: 3D space, coordinates, cube, dimensions, geometry, line, point, rectangular coordinates, right angle, square, tesseract | posted in Math