![]() The mind acquires a development of power”. “When the faculty is acquired - or rather when it is brought into consciousness for it exists in everyone in imperfect form - a new horizon opens. Hinton also promises that when the visualisation is achieved, his cubes can unlock hidden potential. Regardless, the later spelling won acceptance while the early version died with its first appearance. To confuse matters further, by 1904 Hinton was mostly using “tesseract” - I say mostly because the copies of his books I’ve seen aren’t entirely consistent with the spelling, in all likelihood due to a mere oversight in the proof-reading. As is sometimes the case, there seems to be some confusion over the Greek or Latin etymology, and we’ve ended up with a bastardization. ![]() However, in Latin, “tessera” can also mean “cube”, which is a plausible starting point for the new word. ![]() ![]() In Greek, “τεσσάρα”, meaning “four”, transliterates to “tessara” more accurately than “tessera”, and -act likely comes from “ακτίνες” meaning "rays" so Hinton’s use suggests the four rays from each vertex exhibited in a hypercube and neatly encodes the idea “four” into his four-dimensional polytope. He first used it in an 1888 book called A New Era of Thought and initially used the spelling tessaract. The term “tesseract”, still used today, might be Hinton’s most obvious legacy, but the genesis of the word is slightly cloudy. ![]()
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