Honorable Mention, Professional Original

The tesseract became a delightful new concept to me when, as a teen, I read the 1941 short story, “And He Built a Crooked House,” by science-fiction Grand Master Robert Heinlein. In it, a California architect designed a tesseract house shaped like a cube with identical cubes jutting off all four faces. During an earthquake, the four jutting cubes were still there in the fourth dimension. Like Hotel California, it could be entered but left only by jumping out a window. During the next earthquake, the entire house collapsed completely into the fourth dimension and disappeared.

In short, a tesseract is a fourth-dimensional cube, also called a hypercube. Since we, as third-dimensional beings, cannot journey or even see into the fourth dimension, we represent them in both three-dimensional constructs or two-dimensional drawings. We have to then use our imagination. In Tesseract, four cubes share the space in the center and radiate around it.