(anim) (logo) What is a tesseract?

"What is a tesseract?" many people ask... followed closely by the question "Why did you pick THAT for a domain name?" Simply put, a tesseract is a 4th dimensional hypercube. Greek in origin it comes from Tessares meaning four and aktis meanin ray (having radiate form). As for why, that involves a book called A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. This is one of the most widespread uses (misuses unfortunately) of the word tesseract. In her book she uses it to describe a hole in time/space in which one can travel. I read this book as I was growing up and liked the idea and to my disappointment found out that tesseract was actually improperly used, however I liked the sound of it still. So a few years back I was asked to name my computer at work... I flippantly named it "cube" after the Dilbert-esque habitat in which I was forced to inhabit. Then when I got my next computer at work I named it "hypercube" as it was by far more powerful I figured why not just use the same idea and express the power as more dimensions. SO getting back to why I chose thetesseract.org... I did it mainly in keeping in vein with my existing naming conventions, but also I finally had a use for this word I had grown to love earlier in life.

Also, here is a lovely interactive tesseract (using Java) that demonstrates a 4D cube (tesseract) represented on a 2D plane. Thanks much to Harry J. Smith for the use of his java code. As a side note he has many interesting mathematical and algorithmical marvels on his site so you might want to check it out.
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