Re: Visualizing the fourth dimension (was Re: AI: Relative difficulty)

Roderick A. Carder-Russell (rodc@shore.net)
Mon, 20 Jan 1997 10:49:19 -0500 (EST)


On Mon, 20 Jan 1997, Mitchell Porter wrote:

> [Hal Finney]
> > I recall reading about a 19th century
> > mathemetician who spent a lot of time building models of four dimensional
> > objects out of blocks, and who later claimed to be able to visualize them
> > directly in four dimensions. This could be a short cut way to achive this
> > skill.
>
> This would have been Charles Hinton (C. Howard Hinton). It was all
> written up in a book called _The Fourth Dimension_ (Swann
> Sonnenschein & Co., London, 1904) - or maybe it was in _A New Era
> of Thought_ (Sonnenschein, 1888). I'm not aware of any more recent
> editions. There's a little about Hinton in Rudy Rucker's _Geometry,
> Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension_.
>

Another fun book to read on the subject of dimensions (and I
believe this was mentioned in Rucker's book too) is "Flatland" by Edwin A.
Abbott (check the spelling of the last name). It doesn't deal directly
with the fourth dimension, but presents a very fun and lively debate on
the problems and wonders of discovering higher dimensions, through the
eyes of a character named a^2.
______________________________________________________________________________
>H >H
Roderick A. Carder-Russell
Transhumanist/Immortalist/Cryonicist
Suspension Member - Alcor Foundation
specializing in man-machine symbiosis

e-mail: rodc@shore.net WWW: http://www.shore.net/~rodc/home.html
>H >H
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