Stormhammer
09-07-2007, 05:15 PM
A Tesseract ( mentioned in the book A Wrinkle In Time )
In geometry, the tesseract, also called 8-cell or octachoron, is the four-dimensional analog of the (three-dimensional) cube, where motion along the fourth dimension is often a representation for bounded transformations of the cube through time. The tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square; or, more formally, the tesseract can be described as a regular convex 4-polytope whose boundary consists of eight cubical cells.
A generalization of the cube to dimensions greater than three is called a “hypercube”, “n-cube” or “measure polytope”. The tesseract is the four-dimensional hypercube or 4-cube.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word tesseract was coined and first used in 1888 by Charles Howard Hinton in his book A New Era of Thought, from the Ionic Greek “τεσσερες ακτινες” (“four rays”), referring to the four lines from each vertex to other vertices. Some people have called the same figure a “tetracube”, and also simply a "hypercube" (although a hypercube can be a cube of any dimension
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract
In geometry, the tesseract, also called 8-cell or octachoron, is the four-dimensional analog of the (three-dimensional) cube, where motion along the fourth dimension is often a representation for bounded transformations of the cube through time. The tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square; or, more formally, the tesseract can be described as a regular convex 4-polytope whose boundary consists of eight cubical cells.
A generalization of the cube to dimensions greater than three is called a “hypercube”, “n-cube” or “measure polytope”. The tesseract is the four-dimensional hypercube or 4-cube.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word tesseract was coined and first used in 1888 by Charles Howard Hinton in his book A New Era of Thought, from the Ionic Greek “τεσσερες ακτινες” (“four rays”), referring to the four lines from each vertex to other vertices. Some people have called the same figure a “tetracube”, and also simply a "hypercube" (although a hypercube can be a cube of any dimension
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract