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

Mitchell Porter (mitch@thehub.com.au)
Mon, 20 Jan 1997 23:29:40 +1000 (EST)


[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_.

-mitch
http://www.thehub.com.au/~mitch