The Fourth Dimension

What Hacker News says

1. Jun8Feb 2014
   If you think that us 3D people will never be able to wrap their heads around 4D, you have to read Charles Hinton's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Howard_Hinton) The Fourth Dimension (https://archive.org/details/fourthdimension00hintarch). This is the guy who coined the terms ana and kata (from Greek) for the two additional 4D directions, analogous to up/down, etc. (he also invented a gunpowder baseball pitching machine that, some say, led to his dismissal from Princeton, due to player injuries).

   Now that's interesting on its own, but his sister-in-law, Alicia Boole Scott (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alicia_Boole_Stott) is also amazing. She was the daughter of the famous Boole, and made big contributions to higher dimensional mathematics, especially 4D, e.g. she proved there are exactly six regular polytopes in 4D. She "made beautiful cardboard models" of 3D cross sections of these. This, while she was working as a secretary in Liverpool (sad reality of early women scientists/mathematicians).

   They don't make them like that anymore! It would be interesting to have documentary on 4D based on these interesting people.

   EDIT: Also, in catastrophe theory, the Swallowtail catastrophe, which has 3 control and behavioral dimension was named by the French mathematician Bernard Morin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Morin), who is blind since he was 6!

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2. at_a_removeDec 2023
   Hunh. And here I would have thought that Hinton cubes were quite topical.

   I wasn't entirely unserious about the fad, either. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions was made in 1884 and for a while, speculation and attempts at visualization of higher dimensions were popular. Hinton coined "tesseract" in 1888, and by 1904 his book The Fourth Dimension introduced his cubes. In one of Martin Gardner's books I had found a letter discussing a potential downsides of such studies, that some began to inescapably visualize the exercise progression which went along with Hinton's cubes, much to the dismay of a few afflicted.

   The Thirteenth Duke of Wybourne, however, is from The Fast Show; I do a passable impression.

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3. karaterobotNov 2023
   I first learned about this while researching references in From Hell by Alan Moore. Hinton wrote an article called "What is the Fourth Dimension?" which plays a part in the story.
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