Charles Howard Hinton

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Charles Howard Hinton (1853 – 1907) was a British mathematician and writer of science fiction works titled Scientific Romances. He was interested in higher dimensions, particularly the fourth dimension, and is known for coining the word tesseract and for his work on methods of visualising the geometry of higher dimensions. He also had a strong interest in theosophy.

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[edit] Life

Hinton taught at Cheltenham Ladies College while he studied at Oxford, where he obtained his B.A. in 1877. From 1880 to 1886, he taught at Uppingham School in Rutland, where Howard Candler, a friend of Edwin Abbott Abbott's also taught.[1] Hinton also received his M.A. from Oxford in 1886.

In an 1880 article entitled "What is the Fourth Dimension?", Hinton suggested that points moving around in three dimensions might be imagined as successive cross-sections of a static four-dimensional arrangement of lines passing through a three-dimensional plane, an idea that anticipated the notion of world lines, and of time as a fourth dimension (although Hinton did not propose this explicitly, and the article was mainly concerned with the possibility of a fourth spatial dimension), in Einstein's theory of relativity. Hinton later introduced a system of coloured cubes by the study of which, he claimed, it was possible to learn to visualise four-dimensional space (Casting out the Self, 1904). Rumours subsequently arose that these cubes had driven more than one hopeful person insane.

Hinton created several new words to describe elements in the fourth dimension. According to OED, he first used the word tesseract in 1888 in his book A New Era of Thought. He also invented the words "kata" (from the Greek "down") and "ana" (from the Greek "up") to describe the two opposing fourth-dimensional directions—the 4-D equivalents of left and right, forwards and backwards, and up and down.

Hinton's Scientific Romances, including "What is the Fourth Dimension?" and "A Plane World" were published as a series of nine pamphlets by Swan Sonnenschein & Co. during 1884–1886. In the introduction to "A Plane World", Hinton referred to Abbott's recent Flatland as having similar design but different intent. Abbot used the stories as "a setting wherein to place his satire and his lessons. But we wish in the first place to know the physical facts." Hinton's world existed on the surface of a sphere rather than a flat plane. He extended the connection to Abbott's work with An Episode on Flatland: Or How a Plain Folk Discovered the Third Dimension (1907).

Hinton was convicted of bigamy for marrying both Mary Ellen (daughter of Mary Everest Boole and George Boole, the founder of mathematical logic) and Maud Wheldon. He served a single day in prison sentence, then moved with Mary Ellen first to Japan (1886) and later to Princeton University in 1893 as an instructor in mathematics.

In 1897, he designed a gunpowder-powered baseball pitching machine for the Princeton baseball team's batting practice.[2] According to one source it caused several injuries, and may have been in part responsible for Hinton's dismissal from Princeton that year.[3] However, the machine was versatile, capable of variable speeds with an adjustable breech size, and firing curve balls by the use of two rubber coated steel fingers at the muzzle of the pitcher.[4] He successfully introduced the machine to the University of Minnesota where Hinton worked as an assistant professor until 1900, when he resigned to move to the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, DC.

At the end of his life, Hinton worked as an examiner of chemical patents for the United States Patent Office. He died unexpectedly of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 30, 1907.[5][6]

[edit] Influence

Hinton was one of the many abstruse thinkers who circulated in Jorge Luis Borges's pantheon of writers. Hinton is mentioned in Borges's short story, “El milagro secreto” (“The secret miracle”):

“ The Vindication of Eternity he judged to be perhaps less deficient; the first volume recounts the diverse eternities that men have devised, from the motionless Parmenidean One to Hinton’s modifiable past; the second denied (with Francis Bradley) that all the deeds of the universe integrate a temporal series. ”

Hinton is mentioned several times in Alan Moore's celebrated graphic novel From Hell & his theories regarding the fourth dimension form the basis of the book's final chapter. His father, James Hinton appears in the 4th and 10th chapters.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ British Society for the History of Mathematics Gazeteer.
  2. ^ Hinton, Charles, "A Mechanical Pitcher", Harper's Weekly, March 20, 1897, p. 301–302.
  3. ^ Archived Internet reference.
  4. ^ Hinton, Charles, "The Motion of a Baseball", The Yearbook of the Minneapolis Society of Engineers, May, 1908, p. 18–28.
  5. ^ "Scientist Drops Dead", Washington Post, May 1, 1907.
  6. ^ Several of these references are cited in the introduction to the book Speculations on the Fourth Dimension, edited by Rudolf Rucker.

[edit] Books

  • Scientific Romances: First and Second Series, orig. 1884 and 1885, reprinted 1976 with an introduction by James Webb, Arno Press, ISBN 0-405-07954-0
  • A New Era of Thought, orig. 1888, reprinted 1900, by Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Ltd., London
  • The Fourth Dimension, orig. 1904, 1912 by Ayer Co., Kessinger Press reprint, ISBN 0-405-07953-2, scanned version available online at the Internet Archive
  • Speculations on the Fourth Dimension: Selected Writings of Charles H. Hinton, edited by Rudolf Rucker, 1980, Dover Publications, ISBN 0-486-23916-0 (includes selections from Scientific Romances, The Fourth Dimension, "The Recognition of the Fourth Dimension" from the 1902 Bulletin of the Philosophical Society of Washington, and excerpts from An Episode of Flatland)
  • An Episode of Flatland or How a Plane Folk Discovered the Third Dimension orig 1907, Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Limd., uncut illustrated HTML version online at Forgotten Futures

[edit] External links