Views of the Tesseract (1904) _ the Public Domain Review
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Transcript of Views of the Tesseract (1904) _ the Public Domain Review
Views of the Tesseract (1904)
A series of images from Charles Howard Hinton’s The Fourth Dimension(https://archive.org/details/fourthdimensio00hint) (1904), a book all about the “tesseract” – a fourdimensional analog of the cube, the tesseract being to the cube as the cube is to the square. Hinton, aBritish mathematician and science fiction writer, actually coined the term “tesseract” which appearsfor the first time in his book A New Era of Thought (1888). We are not going to pretend to havegiven the time to his book to understand fully the concept behind these diagrams, but they are afascinating series of images all the same (particular the coloured frontispiece featured above), andoffer a glimpse into the theory of fourdimensional space which would prove so important to thedevelopment of modern physics. Although Hinton’s work was an important stepping stone inunderstanding fourdimensional space, the real breakthrough came in a 1908 paper by HermannMinkowski, in which fourdimensional space was thought of in nonEuclidean terms, leading to therevolutionary concept of “spacetime”.
Apart from his ideas and inventions — including a baseball cannon which fired the ball with thehelp of gunpowder — Hinton became notorious for having committed bigamy, marrying Mary EllenBoole in 1880 and Maud Florence in 1883. The scandal subsequently forced him to leave Britainand he traveled to America with his first wife where he taught mathematics at Princeton University,later working for the University of Minnesota as well as the United States Patent Office.
Housed at: Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/fourthdimensio00hint) | From: University of Toronto
(https://archive.org/details/pimslibrary)
Found via: JF Ptak Science Books Blog (http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2014/07/crazycubesbaseballcannonslogic
andthe4thdimension1897.html)
Underlying Work: PD Worldwide (http://publicdomainreview.org/rightslabellingonoursite/#pdworldwide) | Digital Copy: Pending
Clarification
Download: Right click on image or see source for higher res versions
Tags: four dimensions (http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/?tag=fourdimensions), geometry(http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/?tag=geometry), mathematics(http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/?tag=mathematics), maths(http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/?tag=maths), physics
(http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/?tag=physics), spacetime(http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/?tag=spacetime), tesseract
(http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/?tag=tesseract)
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