Hypercube unfolding

You place the globe on an old Oriental carpet covering the hardwood floor of your office. Let s return our attention to hypercubes. Another way to represent a hypercube is to show what it might look like if it was unfolded. You bring out a paper cube that has been taped together and remove some pieces of the tape. By analogy, you can unfold the faces of a paper cube and make it flat (Fig. 4.6). 

You then bring out a paper model of an unfolded hypercube. Sally, we can cut a hypercube and flatten it to the third dimension in the same way we flattened a cube by unfolding it into the second dimension. In the case of the hypercube, the faces are really cubes (Fig. 4.7). 

You point at a poster on the wall. The hypercube has often been used in art. My favorite is the unfolded hypercube from Salvador Dali s 1954 painting Corpus Hypercubus (Fig. 4.8). By making the cross an unfolded tesseract, Dali represents the orthodox Christian belief that Christ s death was a metahistorical event, taking place in a region outside of our space... 

Figure 4.7 One way to unfold a hypercube. Just as with the cube in Figure 4.6, the bottom cubical face must join with the top face when folding the cubes to reform the hypercube. This folding must be done in the fourth dimension. (The forwardmost cubical face is shaded to help clarify the drawing.)...

Sally holds the unfolded hypercube in her slender hands. We ve talked about how a cubical prison couldn t trap a 4-D being. But could a tesseract prison hold such a creature Perhaps we could trap the creature that took the president in a hypercube. ... 

Unfolded hypercube Prediction vector Prediction image... 

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