The Fourth Dimension (book)

This article is about the book by Rudy Rucker. For other uses, see Fourth dimension (disambiguation).

The Fourth Dimension: Toward a Geometry of Higher Reality

First paperback edition cover (note new subtitle)
Author	Rudy Rucker
Language	English
Subject	Mathematics
Genre	Popular mathematics
Publisher	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date	September 1, 1984
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print
Pages	228
ISBN	978-0395344200

The Fourth Dimension: Toward a Geometry of Higher Reality (1984) is a popular mathematics book by Rudy Rucker, a Silicon Valley professor of mathematics and computer science. It provides a popular presentation of set theory and four dimensional geometry as well as some mystical implications. A foreword is provided by Martin Gardner and the 200+ illustrations are by David Povilaitis.

The Fourth Dimension: Toward a Geometry of Higher Reality was reprinted in 1985 as the paperback The Fourth Dimension: A Guided Tour of the Higher Universes. It was again reprinted in paperback in 2014 by Dover Publications with its original subtitle.

Like other Rucker books, The Fourth Dimension is dedicated to Edwin Abbott Abbott, author of the novella Flatland.

Synopsis

The Fourth Dimension teaches readers about the concept of a fourth spatial dimension. Several analogies are made to Flatland; in particular, Rucker compares how a square in Flatland would react to a cube in Spaceland to how a cube in Spaceland would react to a hypercube from the fourth dimension.

The book also includes multiple puzzles.

Reception

Kirkus Reviews called it "animated, often amusing", and a "rare treat", but noted that the book eventually leaves mathematical topics behind to focus instead on "mysticism of the all-is-one-one-is-all thinking of an Ouspensky." The Quarterly Review of Biology declared it to be "nice", and "at times (...) enchanting", comparing it to The Tao of Physics.

See also

• Hiding in the Mirror, a similar book by Lawrence M. Krauss.