Imagining the Fourth Dimension

A four-dimensional space or 4D space is a mathematical extension of the concept of three-dimensional or 3D space. Three-dimensional space is the simplest possible generalization of the observation that one only needs three numbers, called dimensions, to describe the sizes or locations of objects in the everyday world. For example, the volume of a rectangular box is found by measuring its length, width, and height (often labeled x, y, and z).

The idea of adding a fourth dimension began with Joseph-Louis Lagrange in the mid-1700s and culminated in a precise formalization of the concept in 1854 by Bernhard Riemann. In 1880 Charles Howard Hinton popularized these insights in an essay titled "What is the Fourth Dimension?", which explained the concept of a four-dimensional cube with a step-by-step generalization of the properties of lines, squares, and cubes. The simplest form of Hinton's method is to draw two ordinary cubes separated by an "unseen" distance, and then draw lines between their equivalent vertices. This can be seen in the accompanying animation, whenever it shows a smaller inner cube inside a larger outer cube. The eight lines connecting the vertices of the two cubes in that case represent a single direction in the "unseen" fourth dimension.

Higher dimensional spaces have since become one of the foundations for formally expressing modern mathematics and physics. Large parts of these topics could not exist in their current forms without the use of such spaces. Einstein's concept of spacetime uses such a 4D space, though it has a Minkowski structure that is a bit more complicated than Euclidean 4D space.

Single locations in 4D space can be given as vectors or n-tuples, i.e. as ordered lists of numbers such as (t,x,y,z). It is only when such locations are linked together into more complicated shapes that the full richness and geometric complexity of 4D and higher dimensional spaces emerge. A hint to that complexity can be seen in the accompanying animation of one of simplest possible 4D objects, the 4D cube or tesseract.