My recent trip to Canada got me thinking about Canadians and hypercubes. I realize that may sound like an odd association, but I have empirical evidence to back it up.<\/p>\n
When I visited Montreal a while back, and had the good fortune to get a tour of the National Film Board, I saw a large mural drawn by Norman McLaren himself — the pioneering and enormously influential animator. In fact, the building I was visiting was named for him.<\/p>\n
As part of this mural, McLaren had drawn a line, then a square, then a cube, then a hypercube. Essentially, a progression of “cubes” in successively higher dimensions. And then he continued the visual sequence on to even higher dimensions.<\/p>\n
I was reminded of this mural when I visited Autodesk in Toronto. One the many brilliant people who works there is Jos Stam — a genial giant, and the genius responsible for some key computer animation techniques you see in movies.<\/p>\n
On the wall outside his office, he had drawn a line, then a square, then a cube, then a hypercube … continuing onward to seven dimensions. When I met with him, I meant to ask him whether he had seen McLaren’s work at the NFB. But once we got to talking, our conversation quickly wandered to so many topics that I completely forgot about my question.<\/p>\n
Interestingly, I have my own association with Canada and hypercubes. Back in 2010 I built one of the first things I ever made on a 3D printer, during a summer I spent at the Banff Centre for the Arts.<\/p>\n
It was a zoetrope of a tumbling hypercube. In a way it contained five dimensions, since it expressed four spatial dimensions plus time. Here is the blog post I wrote about it<\/a>.<\/p>\n Maybe easier access to higher dimensions is just one of those Canadian things, like their easier access to affordable healthcare.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My recent trip to Canada got me thinking about Canadians and hypercubes. I realize that may sound like an odd association, but I have empirical evidence to back it up. When I visited Montreal a while back, and had the good fortune to get a tour of the National Film Board, I saw a large … Continue reading “Canadian hypercubes”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17972"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17972"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17972\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17973,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17972\/revisions\/17973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}