In geometry, the tesseract or hypercube is a regular polychoron, with eight cubical cellss.
It can be thought of as the four-dimensional analogue of the cube. Roughly speaking, the tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square.
In a square, each vertex has two perpendicular edges incident to it, while a cube has three. A tesseract has four. Canonical coordinates for the vertices of a tesseract centered at the origin are (±1, ±1, ±1, ±1), while the interior of the same consists of all points (x0, x1, x2, x3) with -1 < xi < 1.
A tesseract is bound by eight hyperplanes, each of which intersects it to form a cube. Two cubes, and so three squares, intersect at each edge. There are three cubes meeting at every vertex, the vertex polyhedron of which is a regular tetrahedron. Thus the tesseract is given Schläfli notation {4,3,3}. All in all, it consists of 8 cubes, 24 squares, 32 edges, and 16 vertices. The square, cube, and tesseract are all examples of measure polytopes in their respective dimensions.
Robert Heinlein mentioned hypercubes in at least two of his science-fiction stories. And He Built a Crooked House (1940) described a house built as a net (i.e. an unfolding of the cells into three-dimensional space) of a tesseract. It collapsed, becoming a real hyperdimensional tesseract. Glory Road (1963) included the foldbox, a hyperdimensional packing case that was bigger inside than outside.
A hypercube is also used as the main deus ex machina of Robert J. Sawyer's book Factoring Humanity.
The tesseract is mentioned in the children's fantasy novel A Wrinkle In Time, by Madeleine L'Engle, as a way of introducing the concept of higher dimensions, but the treatment is extremely vague. In that book she uses the tesseract as a doorway, which you can pass through and emerge far away from the starting point, as if the two distant points were brought together at one intersection (at the tesseract doorway) by the folding of space, enabling near-instantaneous transportation.
In Alex Garland's 1998 novel "The Tesseract", the author uses the term to mean the three-dimensional net of the four-dimensional hypercube rather than the hypercube itself. It is a metaphor for the characters' inability to understand the causes behind the events which shape their lives: they can only visualize the superficial world they inhabit.
The movie Cube 2: Hypercube [1] focusses on eight strangers apparently trapped inside a hypercube.
Hypercubes and all kinds of multi-dimensional space and structures star prominently in many books by Rudy Rucker.
See also: 3-sphere hypersphere
Hypercubes in fiction
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