Talk:Tesseract

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[edit] Tesseract.gif

I've rendered a few versions of a rotating tesseract, and think that it doesn't make sense to put all of them on the tesseract page. However, I am having some difficulty choosing between them. I think that the difficulty is in finding a balance between what is more visually clear and what provides more eye candy. I've provided four versions of the file, from earliest to most recent. Which version would be preferred?

In addition to this image, I plan to render other 4D polytopes, and apply a uniform style to all of them (I recently added an animation to the 24-cell page. Input about what makes one image more desirable than another will help me to create better animations. Thanks in advance for any comments.

  1. Image:Tesseract.gif
  2. Image:GlassTesseract.gif
  3. Image:Tesseract2.gif
  4. Image:8-cell.gif

JasonHise 05:44, 18 February 2007 (UTC)

  1. All very nice. I can't decide. It seem like the transparent versions have ray-traced reflections which for me distracts from seeing what apparent edges are real. If so, I'd vote for one with transparent faces and simple depth-sorted blending of direct images only. Tom Ruen 07:23, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
  2. Yeah, very nice. I like the second one (GlassTesseract). The third one has too much reflection, which becomes distracting. It would be nice also to use a different color for back-facing edges/faces (those that lie on the "far" side of the cube in the 4th direction). Well, if it doesn't become too confusing.—Tetracube 23:56, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
  3. Yeah, the raytracing is the main thing I am debating... the reflections are simultaneously both delicious eye candy and detrimentally obfuscating. I might be able to find a way to make ana/kata distance correspond to a color spectrum, though I'd need to do a bit of research to figure out how to pull it off.JasonHise 13:33, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
  4. (The following is copied from my user talk. — JasonHise 01:58, 24 February 2007 (UTC)) Please take this as just a constructive criticism. The tesseract you created isn't as easy to understand as this one, as yours is rotating in two ways, but this picture is obviously inferior in quality to yours. I wondered if it would be too hard for you to remove the superfluous rotation. Mrug2 18:33, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
    Image:Changingcube.gif
  5. I was initially thinking that I needed to strike a balance between the flashy eye candy and something that is easy to understand, but I am now thinking that I should make two separate versions of the image and put both on the page: one that is more fun to watch, and another which would be more useful for building a mental model. For the latter, I think I am going to drop the reflective faces, make the bars thicker, and eliminate the rotation about the z axis (aka the z-w plane). The only other thing I still need to decide is the camera angle. Any preferences? — JasonHise 01:57, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
  6. My preference has always been for Image:GlassTesseract.gif, but I would have liked it to be slower in its rotation. As it is, it's too hard for the eye to follow a single point or line. Thanks.  —Lee J Haywood 10:34, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
  7. You might like some ideas from the java animation with hidden volume elimination I added to the references. This is basically real time 4d ray tracing though I didn't do it like that as microcomputers weren't up to it at the time! There is some documentation attached which explains more. By the way I didn't do it in this old java program but I found that nodding the image up and down when the user wasn't moving it gives me a better 3d feel than a sideways shake.  —Dmcq 08:36, 29 March 2007 (UTC) I've now found an MSc thesis on the same sort of thing to give it more verifiability Four-Space Visualization of 4D Objects by Steven Richard Hollasch 1991 plus Four-Dimensional Views of 3D Scalar Fields by Andrew J Hanson Pheng A Heng, though I don't know why they make such heavy work of it all.  —Dmcq 16:27, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] "Wind"??

I don't know who added the paragraph on nets being unstable, but it doesn't belong in the Projection to 3 dimensions section. Also, I'm not sure I understand what it's trying to say. What exactly is meant by 'wind' blowing the net over? Can somebody please clarify? I suggest we move it to a more appropriate section, and perhaps re-word it so that it's clearer.—Tetracube 00:54, 23 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure it's referring to the fact that a figure built from squares, in 3 dimensions or 4, isn't rigidly self-supporting if the vertices can swivel (this is why trusses are made from triangles). I don't see how this is useful to have in this article, though, so if it's causing confusion, by all means remove it and reword the section. --Christopher Thomas 22:53, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Stereographic projection of a tesseract

I haven't built stereographic projections of 4D hypercubes, but it seems that a cube on a stereographic projection should not have any straight lines, as it has in the main picture. Am I guessing right, that only vertexes are stereographically projected, and lines are just drawn straight to connect correspondent vertexes? -- Dubovik 08:59, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

It's not the projection, but the polytope representation itself. Is a polytope a "tiling on a hypersphere", or "flat elements in 4-space" or BOTH? The first interpretation has curved edges (geodesics on the curved surface), and the second straight edges in flat space. Straight lines should map to straight lines in a stereographic projection. Tom Ruen 09:29, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
No, circles (including straight lines as a degenerate case) map to circles. Possibly Tom had in mind something other than stereographic projection. —Tamfang 01:17, 18 August 2006 (UTC)
We should distinguish between the two representations somehow, not sure what's best. My vote is for flat polytopes, and explain the curved models are different, like a cube blown/stretched out into a spherical balloon. Tom Ruen 09:29, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Um, wait... why is the blue image at the beginning of the article labelled "stereographic projection"? That's not a stereographic projection; that's a perspective projection of the tesseract into 3-space.—Tetracube 16:26, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Tom found stereographic projections of many uniform tilings of S3, and added them to some other polychoron articles; possibly he considered replacing the image here but changed his mind after changing the label? —Tamfang 18:04, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
Okay, I dropped in the new image as well. I guess I accepted a "stereographic projection" as a special "perspective" projection viewed from a point on the 4-sphere. Maybe it only makes sense to talk of this projection with points/edges/faces/cells ALL only on the 4-sphere surface. I guess "perspective" is "more general" in the sense that the point of projection can be placed anywhere from the n-sphere surface and out to infinity where it becomes an orthoscopic projection. Tom Ruen 18:53, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Ah, I see. On another note, does anyone know who came up with the blue image? Is it possible to perform the projection from a different viewpoint? I'd like to see projections from other viewpoints. The one represented is cell-first, which is one of the most common, but there is also vertex-first, which yields a rhombic dodecahedral envelope, and is analogous to the vertex-first projection of the 3D cube (hexagonal envelope). Well, it's a regular rhombic dodecahedron if it's an orthogonal projection; otherwise it's slightly distorted. Edge-first orthogonal yields a hexagonal prism, and face-first orthogonal yields a cuboid, but both are more interesting when you use perspective projection (I don't know what to call the shapes, though I can visualize them in my mind).—Tetracube 19:10, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] unfolding the tesseract

There are 261 ways to unfold a tesseract:

Turney, P.D. (1984), Unfolding the tesseract, Journal of Recreational Mathematics, 17 (1), November, pp. 1-16.

http://members.rogers.com/peter.turney/Unfolding.pdf


Salvador Dali's famous painting Crucifixion ('Corpus Hypercubus') shows one of the 261 unfoldings:

http://lloydsfunds.com/dali_crucifixion.html

- Peter Turney

Sadly, neither of these links work any more. 130.194.13.102 05:25, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

a search for 261+tesseract yields Turney paper —Tamfang 06:34, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "link cells"?

On July 17, Tom changed "[[cell (mathematics)|cell]]s" to "link [[cell (geometry)|cell]]s", with the annotation "link cell (geometry)". Assuming that insertion of the word "link" was a mere lapse, I'll remove it, as I can't think what it might mean here. —Tamfang 01:20, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] information theory?

The section titled "Hypercubes in information theory" is wack. It tosses around layers, dimensions, and precision as virtually interchangeable terms. It contains statements like "hypercubes allow you to reference a number of factors at once," which is really referring to some kind of database, not to a geometrical form. It repeatedly addresses three-dimensional data sets, which are not hyperdimensional. And the whole section seems to stray quite a bit from information theory with discussion of analyzing business data, reference to "end users," etc. This section should be killed, or (gasp!) actually discuss hyperdimensionality in information theory. --Stybn 07:01, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

While you can reasonably think of n-tuples of data as organized in an n-cube, and while things like vector quantization happen in n-space, I agree that the section as-written is whack. --Christopher Thomas 07:11, 28 August 2006 (UTC)
First of all, I agree that I don't quite see what's the geometric connection between tesseracts and information theory (the emphasis being on geometric, since otherwise you're dealing with n-polytopes and not tesseracts specifically). Second of all, even if there is a connection, I doubt it's specifically 4-dimensional, and therefore belongs in the hypercube article, not here. I suggest cleaning up this section and moving it to polytope. Or just junk it.—Tetracube 17:45, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
I second the fact that this section needs a serious cleanup, some source citations and probably should be moved to polytope, as suggested by Tetracube, if not completely removed. It doesn't add anything to the article and as such serves no purpose whatsoever. Jim 10:10, 2 September 2006 (UTC)
Unsourced, unreferenced, and possibly inaccurate. Removed. --Kjoonlee 18:51, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Tesseracts in Literature/ Media

I don't know if anyone has pointed this out yet, but the whole concept of tesseracts in popular media is completely wrong. Tesseracts aren't bigger on the inside than on the outside, and they definitely don't allow you to move in four dimensions just because you're inside one. Imagine a cube sitting on a piece of paper. If some two-dimensional being were to look at it, He would see a square. If he went inside, he would see a square. The only thing that would even indicate to him it was different from any other square is that, since it is essentially made up of an infinite amount of two-dimensional squares, it would appear to him to have an infinite mass. If someone would like to clean up and add this paragraph to the article, feel free to. Unless somebody can give me a good reason why I'm wrong. --Aljo 14:29, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

"If some two-dimensional being were to look at it, He would see a square. If he went inside, he would see a square" - actually he would see a line, since he's 2 dimensional - the only way he could actually realize or know (or perceive) that it's a square would be to move around it (which would mean that he is in fact in Time, and thus 2D+1D (of time)=3D total) - law of perceived dimensions - created by: :) BriEnBest 06:27, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
You're not wrong, per se, although the media concept isn't completely off-base either. Imagine, instead of moving under the bottom face of the cube, your 2D being instead crawled up one of the 4 sides of the cube (he would not notice he was doing this from his 2D perspective, of course). All of a sudden, there are 5 extra square areas inside the initial apparent square, so the inside of the square turns out to have an area equivalent to 5 squares. By dimensional analogy, if a 3D being were to "crawl up the side" of a tesseract instead of going under its bottom facet, he would discover that what he thought was a just a cube before turns out to have the volume of 7 cubes inside. Of course, there are other implications of such a geometry, such as unusual behaviour around the vertices, etc., so the media concept isn't exactly accurate either.
Note that this is just one way of rationalizing the media concept... another approach is, instead of being limited to the facets of the tesseract, imagine a very long cuboidal sheet of 4D paper (or a long rectangular sheet of 2D paper for the analogous 3D case) folded up in a zig-zag fashion so that it becomes a tesseract (cubical) stack of sheets. One end of the sheet is attached to 3D space with an entrance. As a 3D being enters through it, he finds himself in a very long corridor (which can be made infinitely long if the sheet is infinitely thin in the 4th dimension) made of cubical sections, which are the "folds". So here you have another way of extracting infinite 3D volume out of a tesseract while still having only a cubical interface to 3D space. Even if you didn't have an infinitely thin sheet, you still get a lot of 3D volume out of it (think, for example, how many pages would fill a cubical book in 3D: probably numbering in the thousands because they are paper-thin).
There are many other possibilities... although I agree that the media concept is a bit overly generalized (4D isn't equivalent to "fit any volume of any shape in a smaller space"). What would be more interesting is exploring the side-effects of such geometries. For example, And He Built a Crooked House by Robert Heinlein is a very nice story exploring the strange behaviour (as perceived by us 3D beings) around the vertices of a tesseract when 3D beings travel on its cubical facets, such that rooms that "should" be 90 degrees apart are paradoxically connected to each other in a seemingly impossible manner.—Tetracube 18:20, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
But then, going back to the cube, if he could walk up the sides from the inside, couldn't he walk up the sides from the outside as well? I assume this would make the outside and the inside the same size from his point of view. Also, if he were able to walk up the sides, that would somehow mean he on his own had the ability to move in the third dimension, and that he just needed a surface on which to do it, unless that's what you were refering to when you said "unusual behaviour around the vertices"? -- Aljo 19:13, 16 September 2006 (UTC)
I was referring to walking up on the outside. Of course, in discussing things like this, we're making a lot of assumptions. From a "logical" standpoint, there is no reason to assume that 4D objects, if they existed, would be made of the same stuff that objects in our 3D world are made of, and so any generalizations of physical behaviour is potentially inconsistent. Having said that, what is "correct" behaviour depends on what assumptions you're making. If a 3D object bumps into a 4D object, it could simply crumple up, or bounce off, or cut through the 4D object. To use the analogous 2D situation, if a 2D piece of paper bumps against, say, a cube embedded in the plane, it could either crumple up, or get displaced upwards/downwards (move up/down along the sides), or, if the 3D cube was soft enough, it could penetrate straight through (and therefore have no realization that it's a 3D object---for all it knows, the cross-section of the object is the entire extent of the object). All I'm saying is, it is possible to have a model of 3D/4D interaction such that the presence of a 4D object can be perceived as bigger inside than outside. This, of course, requires certain assumptions about how such interactions work; if you have different assumptions, then obviously you'll end up with a different set of behaviours.
Anyway, by unusual behaviour around the vertices, I mean how a 3D being would perceive the vertices of, say, a tesseract, if he was confined to its surface. Analogy: if a 2D being could only travel on the surface of a 3D cube, and light travels on the surface of the cube (bending 90 degrees at the edges, etc.), then the 2D being would not see the cube edges at all, it would look like normal, contiguous 2D space to him, except around the cube corners, where you can circle around something by travelling around only 270 degrees rather than 360 degrees. In other words, it looks like there's a "kink" in space around that point. In the analogous 4D situation, there would be "kinks" at the vertices and also along the edges (but not the ridges) of the tesseract's facets.—Tetracube 05:25, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

I still don't think a two-dimensional being can move in three dimensions, therefore he can't move up and down the sides of the cube. However, if he could, it wouldn't be bigger on the inside than the outside. My main point is that most of the examples in the "in literature" section don't belong here. --Aljo 19:10, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Uh-kay I am like totally freaked out by the whole "HCE turns into a tesseract in Joyce's Finnigans Wake" with a (incomprehensible without advanced degrees in puns and etymology) quote, which describes approximately... zero terreacts. The fact that the word "tesseract" appears in the text doesn't seem to have anything to do with a man transforming into a geometric idea as the article currently claims. Anyways, I'm assuming good faith; can someone check this out? Is this true? Should it even be in the article? Re-reading that quote is making me confuzled. Dikke poes 16:55, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
Well, whether or not a 2D being can move in 3D is really up to one's interpretation, but your point is right: most of the links in the literature section are irrelevant and should be removed. I don't see why it should become the cistern for collecting anything and everything that makes the slightest allusion to hypercubes or 4D in general.—Tetracube 18:01, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

What about Madeleine L'Engle's book A Wrinkle in Time? The concept of a tesseract is explained much differently from cubes or hypercubes, but isn't entirely off-base, either. It's a way of taking the 4th dimension (accepted, in the book anyway, to be "time"), and "folding" it, thus allowing for time-travel, and travel through the space-time continuum. It uses different language, but the concepts aren't that far off from what the tesseract is described as in this article. Therefore, this book should be included in the list of literary/media features of tesseracts.

Eeh, actually, I think she's way off-base. I think in Wrinkle the word tesseract refers to "the act of tessering", tesser being an invented verb for The Interogatives' main mode of travel. And besides, to wrinkle time or space, there needs to be another dimension into which spacetime can wrinkle, for a grand total of five dimensions. Even if cubes were involved (which they aren't), L'Engle's "tesseract" would belong in Hypercube! Proginoskes (talk) 22:40, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm just noticing a bunch of bands and the like who are trying to use this section for some cheap promo. I don't think that sticking the word tesseract into the name of your group really merits an addition to this page, especially when it includes an external link that is completely off-topic. I already removed a few, though I would not be surprised if they tried to made their way back here. Mbruno42 01:30, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Hypercubes in computer architecture

OK, surely this section belongs in hypercube rather than here?? I don't see why it should be here, since the description uses general n whereas this article deals exclusively with the 4-dimensional case.—Tetracube 01:44, 8 November 2006 (UTC)


[edit] External Links

These are some links that were cluttering up the main article but, could still be useful to someone. --The_stuart 16:01, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Tesseract

tesseracts: 4dimantions
hypeper dimentional
i am 11 so if i am missing somthing put it on. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Deathclaw11 (talk • contribs) 11:52, 20 February 2007 (UTC).

wtf...?

[edit] Ionic Greek to Roman letters?

I reverted a change which added the Roman letter equivalence preceeding the Greek letters. The translation looks correct, but it seemed confusing as added. Its pasted below in bold, if anyone thinks its worth keeping or making more clear. Tom Ruen 03:40, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

...the Ionic Greek tesseres aktines, τεσσερες ακτινες” (“four rays”), referring to the four lines from each vertex to other vertices.

[edit] Sentence fragments and clarification

The following appears in the article:

"A multitude of cubes that are nicely interconnected. The vertices of the tesseract with respect to the distance along the edges, with respect to the bottom point."

I bet the first part is a suggestion for conceptualizing a tesseract, while the second is impenetrable. Can someone who knows make these into sentences? Also, it seems like there are some places where it's unclear whether a tesseract is homeomorphic to a 4-ball, a 3-sphere or maybe even a graph. The article's main definition implies the first, while other descriptions seem to conflate things like whether a square is homeomorphic to a 2-ball or to a circle, leading to my confusion. In other words, is a tesseract "hollow?" Orthografer 06:24, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Double Rotation

I have a question about the animation of the tesseract performing a double rotation. If you would do something similar to a cube, you would have this:
http://img293.imageshack.us/img293/112/rotatingprojectionas0.gif
But in reality this is a cube rotating on a single axis, and the animation of that cube rotating is being rotated clock-wise. This can't be considered a cube rotating in 2 axis (or can it?). When we rotate a cube in 2 axis, the shape of the 2d projection will distort and you will see 3 faces of the cube at once at some points. By analogy, I'm guessing you can only rotate the tesseract without afecting the shape of its 3d projection if you only rotate it on a single axis, and if you rotate it in more than 1 axis, this shape would vary between 1 and 3 cells, and not just 1 and 2 like in the animation. Is it right? (i.e, isn't that rotating only the projection of a tesseract performing a single rotation?) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Chronometrier (talk • contribs) 21:27, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm sorry to insist on this, but I think this is an interesting question to ask here, and maybe there are more people with the same doubt. I'm still a little confused by the animation of the "double rotation" on the article, but probably is only the therm that is misleading. I'm basing this only on the analogy with the rotating 3d cube, I'm not a mathematician. The cube has 6 faces, and if you rotate it in a way that the top and bottom face dont change orientation, you will only see 4 faces on the "front". The tesseract has 8 cells (the 6 bounding cubes that form the outer cube, the outer cube itself, and the inner cube). In both the animations of the single and the double rotations, only 4 of these cells become the outer cell, and there are 4 cells that remain "reversed" the entire time. Isn't it possible to rotate the tesseract in a way that all cells eventually becomes the outer cell? If it is, what would that rotation be called? I hope you understand why I'm confused. Chronometrier (talk) 04:32, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
"Rotation about an axis" is a concept that only makes sense in three dimensions. In higher dimensions the correct analogy is "rotation in a plane". In three dimensions, rather than thinking about rotating something about the z-axis you should think about rotating it in the xy plane. In four dimensions, you can do rotations in the xy, xz, xw, yz, yw, or zw planes, but there is no such thing as a "rotation about the w-axis". Now a 2-plane will intersect the tesseract in four of its faces (since a square has four sides). This is why only four of the cells "become the outer cell" in the animation. Hope that helps. -- Fropuff (talk) 05:10, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
I realized my post got too big and I was just repeating myself, so I removed some of my comments. (I'll try to post my questions in a forum in the future instead of here.) Fropuff: Thanks for replying. I didn't think about it this way before. Replace the word "axis" for "plane" in my first comment, on the part about the tesseract, that's what I was trying to ask. Chronometrier (talk) 23:54, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
I would say that the best way to understand this is that a rotation in n-dimensional space is specified by a collection of n-2 vectors. For example, in 3-dimensional space, the length of the vector specifies the magnitude of the rotation (you choose the units) and the direction specifies the axis. If k of these vectors are nonzero, this would be the situation of having "k axes of rotation" using the vernacular in your comment. As for what a rotation such that "all cells eventually becomes the outer cell" would be called, I think the word would be transitive. But I don't think such a thing exists for cubes in n-dimensional space unless n=2 (ie, squares), because any face intersecting the subspace spanned by the "axis vectors" will be fixed by the rotation. Orthografer (talk) 22:33, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
Just to wrap this up, here are the answers I found. It is possible to rotate the tesseract freely as described above, and you can see up to four cells at a time. In this case, the shape of the projection is a "rhombic dodecahedron" (this is partially in the article, but it's a little confusing). As for the double rotation, the two rotations are "independent" from each other, unlike in the cube rotation for instance, where two rotations can only be combined into a single rotation (this isn't in the article, and the explanation in SO(4) is not very friendly either). Chronometrier (talk) 16:32, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Net?

"Unfolding the tesseract: The tesseract can be unfolded into eight cubes, just as the cube can be unfolded into six squares. An unfolding of a polyhedron is called a net. There are 261 distinct nets of the tesseract. The unfoldings of the tesseract can be counted by mapping the nets to paired trees (a tree together with a perfect matching in its complement)."

The second sentence of this section says the unfolding of a polyhedron is called a net. I agree, obviously, but I thought that this was a polychoron. Shouldn't this state that the "unfolding" of any polytope into a lower dimension is called a net? Or maybe the just lower dimension (would a one-dimensional net of a cube still be a cube?). Anyways, I don't think this makes much sense and I'm going to change it. If you wish, edit my edit. 98.27.171.83 (talk) 14:56, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
Good catch - I changed polyhedron to polytope to be correct. Tom Ruen (talk) 15:50, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
Thank you. I was going to edit the article, but when I switched tot he page, I forgot what I was doing and left it.  :) 98.27.171.83 (talk) 20:07, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Tessera and tesseractic

Mark Ronan in Symmetry and the Monster1 writes,

"The tesseract is a four-dimensional crystal of type B, and its name comes from the Greek word tessera, meaning four. If you were measuring four-dimensional volumes you would use 'tesseractic centimeters', as opposed to cubic centimeters in three dimensions, or square centimeters in two dimensions."

This illustrates a connection between the words tessera and tesseractic which seem to be noun and adjective forms. In Latin tessera, -ae can refer to a cubic die or square tile and may suggest an alternative usage or origin for the word tesseract.

1 Ronan, Mark (2006). Symmetry and the Monster. Oxford University Press, 106. ISBN 978-0-19-280723-6. 

In connection with the idea of tiling it should be noted that the Greek word for build is κτιζω and that for bricklayer is κτίστης which would imply that a tesseract is made up of tessera. --Jbergquist (talk) 10:27, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
It would make as much sense to say that triumviratal is the adjective for trio. The connexion between tessera and tesser-act is that the latter was coined from two roots one of which was tessera – meaning 'four' (as in Greek), not 'tiles' (as in Latin). Tesseractic is the adjective for tesseract, nothing else. —Tamfang (talk) 06:14, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
The Greek word for the number "four" is "τεσσερα". But one might also consider the possibility that the root words are borrowed from some other language since there are similar words in ancient Egyptian to the Greek words mentioned above and Alexandria was one of the major centers of learning in the ancient world. "ţes" in ancient Egyptian was a kind of stone possibly cut stone or a stone block. "ţeseru" was the plural for "ţes". "qeţ" was the verb meaning "to build" and "qeţu" meant a "builder" or "mason". Could this be the missing link? Could there be some Masonic influence? --Jbergquist (talk) 23:55, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
Well, yes, it's conceivable that tesseract could have been coined from Egyptian roots meaning 'block'+'mason', or from Polynesian roots meaning 'dew'+'laugh'. Those of a less romantic disposition could look up the book in which Hinton introduced the term, and see what he says about the derivation. —Tamfang (talk) 17:37, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
τεσσερα is Demotic (Koine) Greek which dates from the time of Ptolemy II who came to power in Alexandria in 285 BCE. Prior to that Attic Greek was the dominant dialect and the word for the number four was τετταρες, -α. I've read that τεσσερα is used in Homeric and Ionian Greek which would be consistent with an eastern or Egyptian influence. The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Greek translates four as τεσσερα. In German the word for tesseract is tesserakt which is more consistent with Greek. A tesseract is made from tessera would be logically more consistent with a bounded object than "rays" would be. I will have to look at Hinton to see what he says. Did he coin the word himself or is he repeating something? --Jbergquist (talk) 23:39, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
In The Fourth Dimension Hilton writes,
"If now the cube A moves in the fourth dimension right out of space, it traces out a higher cube--a tesseract, as it may be called."
There is no derivation for the word tesseract here. This was written in 1904(?). I haven't seen A New Era of Thought which is out of print. --Jbergquist (talk) 05:43, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
In The Fourth Dimension, on p. 37, Hinton writes,
"The blocks of stone out of which a house is built are the material for the builder; but, as regards the quarrymen, they are the matter of the rocks with the form he has imposed on them." --Jbergquist (talk) 00:05, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Tesseracts in popular culture - Television and movies

"The television program Andromeda makes use of tesseract generators as a plot device. These are primarily intended to manipulate space (also referred to as phase shifting) but often cause problems with time as well."

This seems misrepresentative of the impact that tesseracts had in the plot of the last two seasons of Andromeda. While there were "tesseract generators" there was a dimensional spacetime phenomena known as "The Route of Ages" which basically a giant tesseract which links a nearly infinite number of universes through a single conduit. While minor, this would be more accurate if it was re-written to address the Route as well as normal tesseract generators. I'm bad at writing objectively right now, so if someone who has an easier time with that could rewrite the quoted entry, that would be great.—24.19.185.181 (talk) 11:03, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Pictures of the "shadow"

Shouldn't it be stated near the top that the images shown here are not actually what a tesseract looks like, but merely what its shadow looks like in 3D? That's what Carl Sagan said, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9KT4M7kiSw&NR=1 64.236.121.129 (talk) 19:38, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

Looks like! :-) That's a good one. Depends on what you mean by looks like I guess. I believe blind people see. Perhaps a tactile device would be a good way of seeing 4 dimensions. The two most common representations are as x-ray images or via slices. In section 7 of Talk:Tesseract#Tesseract.gif above I've referenced another representation I set up that is more like what an eye does so you might like that. And there's all sorts of way of showing distance in the 4th dimension. Was it Plato who said all our perception is of shadows? Thanks for the You tube link I hadn't thought of looking there. Really I need more time in my life for everything I'd like to do :) Dmcq (talk) —Preceding comment was added at 00:06, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Projected onto a 3-Sphere?

In the gallery section of this article the first image, [[Image:Stereographic polytope 8cell.png]] I believe, says "(Edges are projected onto the 3-sphere)". I was wondering if this is correct. I would believe that it should be a "4-sphere", instead of "3-sphere". My reasoning is quite simple: If the edges are all projected at one time, which is what is implied, than it would be like a square being projected onto a circle (a tesseract is 4-D, a 3-sphere is 3-D. Likewise, a square is 2-D and a circle is 1-D. There is one dimension of difference between the square-family object and the circle-family object). This is meaningless. However, one may project a 2-D square onto a (2-)sphere. There are zero dimensions of difference between the two objects. So, a cube (3-D) may be projected onto a glome (3-D sphere), but a tesseract (4-D) cannot. It must be projected onto a 4-D sphere.

Also, this is a menial point, but should it not be "a _sphere", not "the _-sphere"? Thanks. 98.27.163.42 (talk) 19:59, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

3-sphere is a 3D surface embedded in 4D space, just like this image is a cube projected onto a sphere (2-sphere) in 3D space. Image:Square on sphere.png Tom Ruen (talk) 23:52, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Mimsy Were the Borogoves

Is there any particularly good reason to believe the children construct a tesseract in the "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" short story? My impression, from reading the rest of this article, is that the idea is put forth by the movie, but I'm quite certain no such claim is made in the story. Either way, there's something wrong here. If there is reason to believe the children built a tesseract in the original story, the reference in the movie could not be an homage to "A Wrinkle In Time", which it predates by almost 20 years. Volfied (talk) 21:39, 7 June 2008 (UTC)