What is a tesseract?

Question

What is a tesseract?

Answer 1

It's a four-dimensional cube, sort of. It's like how the cube is a three dimensional sqaure, well the tesseract is kind of like the four dimensional cube. It looks like a cube within a cube, where the outer corners of the outer cube and joined by segments to the inner corners of the inner cube.

Answer 2

watch this he's amazing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwL_zi9JN...

and this may also draw a clearer picture

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXKe0SiAT...

Answer 3

aka unraveled hypercube. I love these things. They're 4 dimensional cubes. Humans cannot see in the 4th spatial dimension.

Looks like:

http://www.daviddarling.info/images/tess...

Moving Hypercube:

http://www.herenow4u.de/Pages/eng/Sectio...

In art, Salvador Dali depicts Christ in "Christus Hypercubus"

http://www.sfwriter.com/corpus.jpg

Answer 4

Read: A Wrinkle in Time

Madeleine L'Engle

circa 1960.  

That was the book that introduced the term.  It meant the same thing as later science fiction meant by a 'hyperspace jump'.  It is to cut through a higher dimension, through which 3-dimensional space is assumed to be warped, to pass directly from one part of 3D space to another, without having to travel the distance.  It is pre-Star Trek , Star-Trek.  But it's also a great book and worth reading!!

Answer 5

Quote:

"In geometry, the tesseract, also called an 8-cell or regular octachoron, is the four-dimensional analog of the cube, which is in turn the three dimensional analog of the square. 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 Greek “τέσσερεις ακτίνες” (“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 of any dimension)."