John Carlos Baez on Nostr: Do you know about Charles Howard Hinton? He's one of those strange Victorian ...

Do you know about Charles Howard Hinton? He's one of those strange Victorian characters. He coined the word "tesseract" for a 4-dimensional cube - a word mainly used by SF writers, not mathematicians. But that's just the beginning.

In his 1888 book A New Era of Thought, he advocated the spiritual benefits of visualizing 4-dimensional geometry. In his later book The Fourth Dimension, he developed a system of colored cubes to help people do this.

Rumors subsequently arose that these cubes drove than one person insane.

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