Unfoldings · 4D
Unfolded Tesseract
The Dalí cross: eight cubes folding into 4D
Unfold a cube and you get a cross of six squares. Unfold a tesseract and you get this: eight cubes in a cross. Fold it and every cube swings through the fourth dimension until they close into a hypercube.
- Cubes
- 8
- Folds
- 90° each, into W
- Nets
- 261
Watch it turn through the fourth dimension, hear the chord of its edges, and slice it with our space to see it pass through.
Facts
- Six cubes swing up from the central one; the last cube folds twice and caps the far side.
- At full fold, the central cube and the capping cube are opposite cells of the tesseract.
- Just as the cube has 11 flat nets, the tesseract has 261 different 3D nets.
- Animate the fold and watch it in perspective: the cubes seem to shrink as they turn away through W.
History and meaning
Salvador Dalí painted Christ on this net in Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus), 1954. In Robert Heinlein’s 1941 story “And He Built a Crooked House” a house built in its shape folds up in an earthquake.
