Tesseract


In geometry, the tesseract is the four-dimensional analogue of the cube; the tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square. Just as the surface of the cube consists of six square faces, the hypersurface of the tesseract consists of eight cubical cells. The tesseract is one of the six convex regular 4-polytopes.
The tesseract is also called an eight-cell, C8, octachoron, octahedroid, cubic prism, and tetracube. It is the four-dimensional hypercube, or 4-cube as a part of the dimensional family of hypercubes or measure polytopes. Coxeter labels it the polytope.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word tesseract was coined and first used in 1888 by Charles Howard Hinton in his book A New Era of Thought, from the Greek τέσσερεις ἀκτίνες, referring to the four lines from each vertex to other vertices. In this publication, as well as some of Hinton's later work, the word was occasionally spelled "tessaract".

Geometry

The tesseract can be constructed in a number of ways. As a regular polytope with three cubes folded together around every edge, it has Schläfli symbol with hyperoctahedral symmetry of order 384. Constructed as a 4D hyperprism made of two parallel cubes, it can be named as a composite Schläfli symbol × , with symmetry order 96. As a 4-4 duoprism, a Cartesian product of two squares, it can be named by a composite Schläfli symbol ×, with symmetry order 64. As an orthotope it can be represented by composite Schläfli symbol × × × or 4, with symmetry order 16.
Since each vertex of a tesseract is adjacent to four edges, the vertex figure of the tesseract is a regular tetrahedron. The dual polytope of the tesseract is called the regular hexadecachoron, or 16-cell, with Schläfli symbol, with which it can be combined to form the compound of tesseract and 16-cell.
The standard tesseract in Euclidean 4-space is given as the convex hull of the points. That is, it consists of the points:
A tesseract is bounded by eight hyperplanes. Each pair of non-parallel hyperplanes intersects to form 24 square faces in a tesseract. Three cubes and three squares intersect at each edge. There are four cubes, six squares, and four edges meeting at every vertex. All in all, it consists of 8 cubes, 24 squares, 32 edges, and 16 vertices.

Projections to two dimensions

The construction of hypercubes can be imagined the following way:
s as shown above

It is possible to project tesseracts into three- and two-dimensional spaces, similarly to projecting a cube into two-dimensional space.
Projections on the 2D-plane become more instructive by rearranging the positions of the projected vertices. In this fashion, one can obtain pictures that no longer reflect the spatial relationships within the tesseract, but which illustrate the connection structure of the vertices, such as in the following examples:
A tesseract is in principle obtained by combining two cubes. The scheme is similar to the construction of a cube from two squares: juxtapose two copies of the lower-dimensional cube and connect the corresponding vertices. Each edge of a tesseract is of the same length. This view is of interest when using tesseracts as the basis for a network topology to link multiple processors in parallel computing: the distance between two nodes is at most 4 and there are many different paths to allow weight balancing.

Parallel projections to 3 dimensions


The cell-first parallel projection of the tesseract into three-dimensional space has a cubical envelope. The nearest and farthest cells are projected onto the cube, and the remaining six cells are projected onto the six square faces of the cube.
The face-first parallel projection of the tesseract into three-dimensional space has a cuboidal envelope. Two pairs of cells project to the upper and lower halves of this envelope, and the four remaining cells project to the side faces.
The edge-first parallel projection of the tesseract into three-dimensional space has an envelope in the shape of a hexagonal prism. Six cells project onto rhombic prisms, which are laid out in the hexagonal prism in a way analogous to how the faces of the 3D cube project onto six rhombs in a hexagonal envelope under vertex-first projection. The two remaining cells project onto the prism bases.
The vertex-first parallel projection of the tesseract into three-dimensional space has a rhombic dodecahedral envelope. Two vertices of the tesseract are projected to the origin. There are exactly two ways of dissecting a rhombic dodecahedron into four congruent rhombohedra, giving a total of eight possible rhombohedra, each a projected cube of the tesseract. This projection is also the one with maximal volume. One set of projection vectors are u=, v=, w=.

As a configuration

This configuration matrix represents the tesseract. The rows and columns correspond to vertices, edges, faces, and cells. The diagonal numbers say how many of each element occur in the whole tesseract. The nondiagonal numbers say how many of the column's element occur in or at the row's element.

Image gallery

Alternative projections


The tetrahedron forms the convex hull of the tesseract's vertex-centered central projection. Four of 8 cubic cells are shown. The 16th vertex is projected to infinity and the four edges to it are not shown.
Stereographic projection

2D orthographic projections

Radial equilateral symmetry

The long radius of the tesseract is equal to its edge length; thus its diagonal through the center is 2 edge lengths. Only a few polytopes have this property, including the four-dimensional tesseract and 24-cell, the three-dimensional cuboctahedron, and the two-dimensional hexagon. In particular, the tesseract is the only hypercube with this property. The longest vertex-to-vertex diameter of an n-dimensional hypercube of unit edge length is, so for the square it is, for the cube it is, and only for the tesseract it is, exactly 2 edge lengths.

Tessellation

The tesseract, like all hypercubes, tessellates Euclidean space. The self-dual tesseractic honeycomb consisting of 4 tesseracts around each face has Schläfli symbol . Hence, the tesseract has a dihedral angle of 90°.
The tesseract's radial equilateral symmetry makes its tessellation the unique regular body-centered cubic lattice of equal-sized spheres, in any number of dimensions.
The tesseract itself can be decomposed into smaller polytopes. For instance, it can be triangulated into 4-dimensional simplices that share their vertices with the tesseract. It is known that there are 92487256 such triangulations and that the least number of 4-dimensional simplices in any of them is 16.

Related complex polygon

The regular complex polytope 42,, in has a real representation as a tesseract or 4-4 duoprism in 4-dimensional space. 42 has 16 vertices, and 8 4-edges. Its symmetry is 42, order 32. It also has a lower symmetry construction,, or 4×4, with symmetry 44, order 16. This is the symmetry if the red and blue 4-edges are considered distinct.

Related polytopes and honeycombs

As a uniform duoprism, the tesseract exists in a : ×.
The regular tesseract, along with the 16-cell, exists in a set of 15 uniform 4-polytopes with the same symmetry. The tesseract exists in a sequence of regular 4-polytopes and honeycombs, with tetrahedral vertex figures,. The tesseract is also in a sequence of regular 4-polytope and honeycombs, with cubic cells.

In popular culture

Since their discovery, four-dimensional hypercubes have been a popular theme in art, architecture, and science fiction. Notable examples include:
The word tesseract was later adopted for numerous other uses in popular culture, including as a plot device in works of science fiction, often with little or no connection to the four-dimensional hypercube of this article. See Tesseract.