Stained Glass Hypercubed
Published Saturday, June 23rd, 2007 at 10:32 pm
I recently returned from a trip to Japan to visit the in-laws. My father-in-law speaks very little English and I speak even less Japanese so we often communicate though gestures and single words. One day I noticed a very cubic looking stained glass lamp shade he had made (stained glass is a hobby of his). That gave me an idea. With a little help from my mother-in-law, who speaks very good English, I showed him a hypercube (ok, it is really as 3-D shadow of a tesseract but let’s not get technical). I don’t think he fully understood what a hypercube was (then again nobody does) but he was interested. So we sat together and worked out the dimension of each piece necessary to make a glass hypercube. It was very nice to have that moment with him… communicating though math. A week after I returned from my trip I received the following picture via e-mail. He made a stained glass hypercube! It looks spectacular. I’m very impressed.
