Not Just Outside the Box, but Orthogonal to It

One of the many after-hours events contributing to my exhaustion this week was the annual Sigma Xi award and initiation banquet, at which some fifty students were recognized for their undergraduate research accomplishments.

The banquet also featured a very nice presentation on visualizing a four-dimensional cube by Prof. Davide Cervone of the Math department here. He went through a bunch of different ways to picture a four-dimensional object through analogies to lower-dimensional objects. It was as close as I’ve ever come to feeling like I understood how to think about higher dimensional objects.

In addition to that talk, he has a bunch of other presentations online, as well as some nifty animations of four-dimensional objects. It’s great, geeky fun.